| "Style" is defined as a consistent and statistically significant regularity of occurrence in text of certain items and structures, or types of items and structures, among those offered by the language as a whole. A study of style that involves both the original and the translated texts is termed "translational stylistics". Investigating translator's style in literary translation, this dissertation is a case study in translational stylistics. The crucial translator under discussion is Xiao Qian, a prolific translator and writer. Xiao's status as a translator and writer makes his translation an interesting object in translational stylistics, allowing an analyst to compare the linguistic styles of his translation with his free writing in Chinese. The similarity between the two may be an indication of idiosyncratic style of the man of letters.Of all the translations done by Xiao, Ulysses alone is selected as the source text for study. A novel of kaleidoscopic styles, Ulysses best displays James Joyce's creativity as a renowned modernist novelist, who T. S. Eliot regards as "the greatest master of the English language since Milton". Joyce maneuvers freely the English language to express his deep hatred for religious hypocrisy and colonizing oppressions, as well as his well-masked patriotism for his motherland. The stylistic changes in the novel provide the analyst a great variety of interesting instances for a comparative study in translational stylistics. Besides Xiao's translation, this study also includes Jin Di's translation of Ulysses, which functions as another dimension of comparison. Like Xiao, Jin published the first volume of his translation of Ulysses also in 1994. The simultaneity of the publication forms a fair basis for a study aiming at finding clues of stylistic features in the translators.The case study of the Chinese translations of Ulysses adopts the empirical methodology used in corpus-based translation studies. Self-designed and small-scaled, the Corpus of Translation and Composition (CTC) consists of Joyce's English novel Ulysses and its two Chinese versions produced by Xiao and Jin, as well as the Chinese original novel and stories written by Xiao. By using WordSmith Tools to retrieve data from the corpora, the researcher starts to look for factors that contribute to the stylistic features of the translated text, and to testify the hypothesis that the translator leaves his own linguistic style in the translated text. The empirical approach applied in corpus-based translation studies outweighs the traditional intuition-based method, because the presentation of all relevant information and instances by computer programs can bypass the arbitrariness and partiality of the human mind.A research model for translational stylistics is designed to measure the stylistic proximity of the source and target texts. The fundamental idea for the model is that style in the original work embodies the author's literary motivation, which the translator must first discern and then consider whether it needs to be represented in the translation and, if yes, how. Ideally, the eventual style of the target text should be identical with that of the source text, but since each language has its unique linguistic features, the two styles can only achieve some similarity at best. The research model used in this study is illustrated as follows.Author's Motivation Translator's Motivation (?) (?)Style of Source Text≈Style of Target Text↓↑Translator's Discernment→Translator's DecisionWith the guidance of the checklist provided by Leech and Short (1981:69), the analyst breaks the elements of the authorial style down to its lexical, collocational, syntactical and rhetorical levels, investigating how they manifest Joyce's artistic motivations and how they are reproduced by the translators.At the lexical level, the study focuses on uncovering features of lexical diversity in the translation as compared with the original, which covers standardized type-token ratio, lexical idiolects of the translators and the translation of hyponyms. The first finding is that the two translators do not differ much in standardized TTR in the translation of Ulysses, but Xiao uses a more diverse vocabulary in his translations than in his writing. A possible reason for the difference is attributed to the different scope of subject matter in Xiao's and Joyce's works. Secondly, the two translators differ in lexical preference, each relying on a set of favored words. Xiao prefers to use more emotional particles in translation than Jin. The keyword-list comparison of Xiao's writing with Xiao's translating also reveals that he has shown consistent lexical preference, as can be seen by the high frequency of "踱" and other words in both texts. The finding testifies to the hypothesis that a text producer's habitual wording style works its subtle influence on both free writing and translating. Thirdly, the study on hyponyms of different ways of walking in the source text reveals that the translators tend to use superordinate terms when no equivalent hyponyms are available in the target language; however, by adding adverbs or adjectives to the superordinate terms, the translators manage to express the original meaning of the hyponyms. This finding points to the peculiar language system as one of the constraining factors that limits the translator's range of choice of words.The study on authorial creative collocation is exemplified by the three lemmas LAUGH, SMILE and SAY in Joyce's Ulysses. The study on Xiao's own writing portrays a gifted writer who avails himself of the Chinese words in a number of innovative ways. However, when translating Joyce, an author who appreciates creativity above anything else, Xiao becomes conservative towards stylistic innovation and levels out many unusual, personal collocations in Joyce's Ulysses into mediocre phraseology. The finding seems to lead to a conclusion that one tends to grow more scrupulous in language innovation when he is dealing with another's work, though he may be quite confident in experimenting with unusual ways of expression in his own composition. The difference may be caused by the divergent roles the writer/translator envisions himself to be playing in the two situations. Compared with authentic writing, a translation occupies merely a "marginal status" (Venuti 1998:1-2). Working under the constraints of the linguistic and cultural constituents of the foreign texts, on the one hand, and the acceptability of the target text by the readers, on the other, the translator has to make a decision between form and content, especially in cases where an authorial style is not readily in conformity to the target-language norms. The struggle often ends with the surer conveyance of the meaning at the sacrifice of authorial stylistic originality. A mechanism that is working its effect on all this decision-making process is the self-awareness of his role as a translator rather than an author, an identity that bestows upon him more fetters than freedom. Therefore, a translation is, more often than not, inferior to the original, domestic or foreign.The syntactic level of the study covers three aspects:sentence complexity, ungrammatical structures and placement of clauses. Sentence complexity is elucidated mainly by statistics in mean sentence length. The study finds that in the three texts in Chinese (Xiao's and Jin's versions of Ulysses and Xiao's Chinese writing), the mean sentence length in Xiao's translation of Ulysses is the shortest. This is because in Xiao's versions, some long English sentences are divided into shorter, more easily read and understood Chinese sentences. The division has resulted in a somewhat distorted stylistic effect of Joyce's original writing, particularly his use of long, unpunctuated sentences written in a stream-of-consciousness technique. Most of the ungrammatical structures in Ulysses are normalized in both versions:end-clipped words are translated into Chinese words that carry the full meaning of the original, and the unusual word order is readjusted into a more conventional Chinese sentence structure. Such ungrammaticaliy is a deliberate means of non-conformity to traditional English language, "the language of the colonizer" in Joyce's eye; therefore, it has its stylistic significance. The Chinese translators simply cannot represent this style in the target language, owing to the constraints of the different language systems. Besides normalization, which channels the alien structure to the norm of the target language, there are also traces of foreignness to be found in the translated texts, which mark the difference between a translation and a non-translated, original writing. In the case under study, the much higher frequency of the post-positioned adverbial clauses in the translated text than in the original Chinese text discloses the interference of the source language structure in the process of translation. The researcher is confirmed that interference of the source language is inescapable in translation because translation is, by nature, derivative. It is just because of the presence of the foreign features as a result of the source-language interference that distinguishes the translated texts from non-translated ones. Because of the distinctive features manifested in translated texts, the translational language has been referred to as "the third code" (Frawley 1984), "the third language" (Duff 1981) or "hybrid language" (Trosborg 2000). In respect of figures of speech of individual characters, Joyce creates in Ulysses a long cast of characters with distinctive personality, mostly manifested through their dialogue and interior monologue. Whether the translator transfers the individualized speech style of these personae to the reader is counted as a matter of stylistic significance. Three characters'speech styles are discussed in this study: Lenehan, Bloom and the unnamed narrator in the "Cyclops" episode. These examples demonstrate the significance of reproducing the individualized speech style in the translation. In the sense that it is through the translator that the fictional characters in one language meet the reader in another, the translator acts like a busy matchmaker, to borrow Goethe's metaphor, who, by "praising a half-veiled beauty as worthy of our love", "excite an irresistible yearning for the original." (Robinson 2006:224). If the translator does not introduce the beauty in a style that becomes her, the reader will misjudge her, and the translator will have failed in his matchmaking business.The researcher maintains that four factors contribute to the target text's stylistic features. The first is the translator's knowledge of stylistics and competence for analyzing the stylistic features of the original author as manifested in the source text. Boase-Beier (2006:29) declares that "a translator who is stylistically aware is likely to be able more fully to appreciate both stylistic effects and the state of mind or view that informs them." This holds true for literary and non-literary text types, but the distinction is more conspicuously manifested in literary works, because style is a more subtle and creative factor in the literary genre than in others. The second factor is the translator's view on the relation between form and content. A translator who regards style as a sign that possesses its "material substance", that is "never fully distinguishable from its signifying properties", as Jakobson put it (Bradford 1994:3), will treat it more seriously than one who posits it as "ornament" (Puschel 1980:305-6), which is something to be sacrificed when necessity claims. Unlike Jin, who takes Joyce's kaleidoscopic styles seriously and appreciated his innovative style of writing, Xiao does not approve of Joyce's experimental writing style. When he finds Joyce's experimental way of writing is likely to cause unnecessary confusion to the reader, he chooses to translate the sense at the cost of the style. In the preface to his translation of Ulysses Xiao explains his translation strategy, saying that "we do our utmost to disentangle all the knotty abstruse points in the novel, making the translation as fluent and colloquial as possible" (2005:16). This objective for fluency and colloquialism explains the reason why Xiao divides long complex sentences into shorter ones and punctuates texts in accordance with the reader's normal reading habits. The high readability is the reward for Xiao's "disentanglement". Although Jin preserves more of the original author's style than Xiao, they both fail to retain some aspects of style, thanks to the different characteristics of the languages involved. This leads to the third factor that contributes to the stylistic features of the target text:the manner in which the source style is composed. If the source-text style is created depending on the linguistic forms at the phonological and morphological level, it will be very hard to transfer across to another language due to the heterogeneity of different languages. A style created out of the graphological features of a language is also untranslatable. Styles created at the syntactic level would be easier to reproduce in another language, especially between kinship languages in the Indo-European language family. Styles created at the semantic level would pose the least challenges in translation, since in most cases there are equivalents in the target language that correspond to words in the original text, constituting the prerequisite of translation between languages. The fourth factor that influences the style of the target text is the literary tradition in the recipient culture. Literary tradition shapes the reader's aesthetic expectations, which will exert influences on the translator's literary choices and the critic's quality assessment criteria of the translation. The gap between different literary intertexts and socio-cultural situations cannot be easily bridged, therefore the translator has to weigh carefully the two cultures he must negotiate and strike a balance between them.The corpus-based translation study carried on the lexical, collocational, syntactical and rhetorical levels leads the researcher to conclude that, generally speaking, Xiao's translational style is more transparent and Jin's, more opaque. Xiao filters out those authorial stylistic features that are not conformed to the target linguistic, cultural and literary norms, and in so doing enhances the readability of the translation and meets the target-language reader's expectations. In contrast, Jin preserves most of the stylistic features in the source text, presenting to the target reader a translation that is somewhat different from their aesthetic experiences when reading non-translated literary text, reminding them by unfamiliar sentence structures or other devices that they are reading a translation. No single methodology can claim itself to be universally applicable, nor can any study be totally free from partiality. However, through incomplete, partial understanding at a time, our knowledge about the Truth will be accumulated over the time. The corpus-assisted methodology used in the current study has helped us make conclusions which would not have been available by an intuitive qualitative stylistic study. Though the case study presented here is by no means exhaustive as a research in translational stylistics, it has been expected to be a step forward toward a more complete understanding and researching about the presence of translator's style in the translation he has produced in the target culture.
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