A Comparative Study Of Translators’ Styles In The Two English Versions Of Shi Jing

Translator’s style refers to a translator’s recurrent and habitual linguistic features in his or her translations differentiated from that of other translators.Traditional translation studies usually concentrate on whether the translator reproduces the author’s style,which emphasizes the translator’s invisibility.In the late 20 th century,with the rise of Descriptive Translation Studies(DTS)and the establishment of Corpus-based Translation Studies(CTS),researchers employ corpus tools to reveal translator’s distinctive translation style from a statistical perspective,which facilitates the rapid development of translator’s style studies.Shi Jing,the first anthology of poetry in China,bears abundant social,historical and cultural values.From the inklings of its translation in the 18 th century,there have been more than 50 English versions to date,of which about 20 are complete.Nevertheless,the study of its different translators’ styles is less satisfactory,short of objective,comprehensive and multidisciplinary description.The thesis divides Shi Jing and its two translations by James Legge and Xu Yuanchong into Guofeng,Xiaoya,Daya and Song.With the assistance of corpus tools,it investigates the two translators’ linguistic differences at lexical,syntactic and textual levels as well as their divergent strategies in translating the rhetorical devices and cultural items with the analysis of the paratext.The comparison among the four translations by the same translator indicates the translator’s stylistic consistency while the comparison between the two translators’ complete translations reveals the idiosyncrasies of the translators’ styles.Finally,it attempts to propose possible explanations for the stylistic differences from internal and external factors.The results indicate that there is significant difference between the two translators’ styles.At the lexical level,Legge uses longer words and nouns with less lexical variation and lower information load but more lexical complexity while Xu Yuanchong tends to use simple short words and lexical verbs with more diversity and higher information load.Besides,Legge inclines to use longer forms while Xu prefers contracted forms and both translators exhibit their own unique words and choices of pinyin systems;At the syntactic level,Legge uses longer sentences with more length deviation,more passive voice and existential sentence while Xu prefers length-balanced and compressed sentences,more active voice and non-existential sentence;At the textual level,Legge uses more conjunctions and references,especially third person pronouns and distal demonstratives while Xu utilizes less connective methods but inclines to use more first and second person pronouns as well as proximal demonstratives.In addition,the two translators employ different translation strategies.Legge faithfully represents the original culture and artistic techniques through thick translation while Xu reconstructs the source text by adapting to the target culture and poetic tradition.The stylistic differences of the two translators are mainly attributed to the translators’ divergent identities,translation thoughts and translation goals against different socio-cultural backgrounds.Based on a corpus-driven case study of James Legge’s and Xu Yuanchong’s Shi Jing translations,the thesis has revealed the stylistic differences of the two translators as well as the underlying factors of the divergence.In this way the thesis has demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of the corpus-based methodology in the study of translator’s style.In addition,the descriptive study not only exhibits the linguistic features of Legge and Xu at microscopic levels but deepens the readers’ understanding of how the socio-cultural contexts in which the two translators live manipulate their translatorial behaviors.