A Study On Translators’ Styles From The Diachronic And Synchronic Perspectives

With a diachronic study and a synchronic study as the major framework, this paper looksinto the translator’s style of three English translations of the Chinese literary classicLiaozhaizhiyi in the context of corpus translation studies (CTS). The diachronic study oftranslations digs into the translator’s style of two major Liaozhai versions belonging todiffering historic periods spanning almost one hundred, aiming at finding the causalconnection between the key variant of history and the formulation of the translator’s style;while the synchronic study of translations focuses on testing whether the translators of thesame times show their characteristic styles in translations largely because of their differingcultural identity and strategies of cultural exchanges.Both the diachronic study and the synchronic study are indebted to the basic researchmode and key analytical tools provided by CTS. Also, both the two studies draw on the dataprovided by the self-constructed monolingual corpus of Liaozhaizhiyi and therefore enablethe writer of the present paper to analyze the interaction between the translator’s style,acceptance of translations and cultural exchanges by adopting various methods such asobjective description, case study and questionnaire, etc.On such bases, the present paper succeeds in arriving at the following three findings,hence making its unique contributions to the translation studies on the whole:First, a methodology of conducting a diachronic and synchronic study of translations onthe basis of CTS comes into being. CTS promises a paradigm shift in the research mode andanalytical tools, whose typical applications include explorations into diachronic versions andsynchronic versions of the same original in order to find the unique translation’s style andtranslator’s style. The present study takes advantage of the self-constructed small corpus ofLiaozhaizhiyi and analyzes the translator’s style in different layers of the translations, whichmakes up for the possible flaws of the traditional qualitative research modes featuringintrospection or comment and points out a new direction for analyzing the translator’s style inliterary translations. Second, this paper has constructed a comprehensive research mode of the translator’sstyle based on the English translations of Liaozhaizhiyi. This attempt is made out of thecurrent shortage of both individual researchers and fruitful research outcomes of the Englishtranslations of Liaozhaizhiyi, and it finally reaches a research mode covering both thelinguistic and extra-linguistic layers of the translations, with the former further broken up toinvestigations into the main translated texts and paratexts and the latter focusing ontranslator’s preferences of selections and translator’s persistent translation strategies whichmay bear correlations with the socio-historical elements and the targeted readership. As far asthe research emphasis is concerned, the investigation on the linguistic layer of the translator’sstyle stresses the target-text-oriented translator’s style with due concerns on thesource-text-oriented translator’s style, while the extra-linguistic layer of the translator’s stylesingularly looks into the target-text-oriented translator’s style.At last, the paper has shed light on the correlations between reader’s acceptance, culturalexchange and translator’s style. Following up the first two research focuses, the author of thepresent paper designs a questionnaire for focus groups, aiming to get their responses aboutcertain noticeable stylistic features of the translator’s and survey their acceptance and effectamong the focus groups of readership. As it turns out, the subjects show their explicitattitudes toward almost all the stylistic features demonstrated in the questionnaire. Thequestionnaire result suggests that some favorable stylistic features should be added to theEnglish translations of Chinese classics if China intends to popularize its literary classics andits culture among the overseas readership, especially the young readership.