A Corpus-based Study On The Translation Of Women's Language Illustrated By The Case Of Wang Xifeng

The present dissertation,under the theoretical framework of gender theory in Sociolinguistics and feminist translation theory,is dedicated to analyze and sum up the verbal and nonverbal features of women's language and its translations illustrated from the case of Wang Xifeng,a major female character in one of the four literary classics-Hongloumeng who gives the most utterances.Based on a self-built and detailed tagged one-to-two parallel corpus of all the verbal language of female and male characters in the novel and a thus-extracted subcorpus of that of Wang Xifeng,the research explores women's language and its translations through statistical and comparative analysis of the original text and the two English versions-one by David Hawkes together with John Minford and the other by Yang Xianyi cooperated with his wife Gladys Yang with a methodology of both quantitative and qualitative analyses from five aspects: lexicon,syntax,paralanguage,kinesics and chronemics ? proxemics.O ne of the conclusions of this research is that compared with Yang's version,Hawkes' version puts more efforts to “gender parody” and presents more traces of “androgyny” by adhering to the original characteristics of women's language including the explicitation of women's self and body and another one is that Yang's version is more business-oriented while Hawkes' version more human-oriented.Inspired by the results,the author makes a bold attempt to show a mechanism of gender factors in translation and a model if his/her perspective in translation.The structure of this dissertation,with C hapter Three,Chapter Four and Chapter Five as its main body,is presented as follows.Chapter One tracks the inspiration sources of the research topic,formulates its research targets,contents and questions,presents the significances and innovation objectives,predicts possible difficulties,particularizes the methodology as long as sets up the structure.Chapter Two gives a brief history account of the two theories: sociolinguistic gender theory and feminist translation theory and illustrates their research status home and abroad along with critical comments,which is followed by a display of the female language features both in English and C hinese concluded by former scholars and researchers and some constructive notions raised up by feminist translation researchers including “body translation”,“hijacking”,“womanhandling”,“gender parody” and “androgyny”.Chapter Three first introduces how material is chosen,collected and sorted,and a parallel corpus and a subcorpus are built up along with tags of speakers,listeners as well as their genders,and then systematically and specifically probes in women's language features and its translation features from a lexical perspective including its readability,lexical density,level of difficulty,average word length,parts of speech,high-frequency words,key words and unique words with a contrastive study with Yang's and Hawkes'full translations.The findings are as follows:first,women tend to reveal and concentrate themselves in conversations with a lot of“?”and“??”,show a high frequency of the adoption of pronouns,tone and mood words,interjections and negative words,and second,Yang's translation highlights the usage of content words with a more diversified,uncommon,dense and difficult vocabulary system while Hawkes'translation puts more weight on the adoption of function words especially pronouns and interjections with a less difficult,obscure,changeable and dense vocabulary system and a strategy of simplification,which however,particularly strengthens the revelation of women's selves by clarifying their presence,adding detailed descriptions,and enhancing their emotions and feelings.Chapter Four discusses the syntactic features of the original text and the two English texts with the help of the corpus and relevant text-processing software from the perspectives of sentences' length,function and structure and variables being considered are average sentence length,sentence categories,question sentences,exclamation sentences,special sentence patterns as well as sentence heads and tails.The statistics and analysis suggest that women tend to utter long and complex sentences and Hawkes' version has more long sentences than Yang's though the former already adopts a strategy of simplification in overall sentence uses compared with its full translation.Though Hawkes' version owns more highly-flexible short sentences and highly-logical and more-tangible long ones than Yang's,it lacks the using of conjunction words and faithful convey of culture-loaded expressions in the original text which implicitates and sometimes even deletes C hinese cultural elements.Yang's version stays more faithful to the sentence structures of the original text and has a higher proportion of medium-length sentences,however with less flexible sentence structures than Hawkes' version which also explicitate action doers and bears and strong feelings.Chapter Five,from a nonverbal dimension,chooses three aspects in embodying relevant features which are paralanguage,kinesics and chronemics ? proxemics and they are interconnected as a whole with variables of vocal alternants,vocal characterizers,facial expressions,body movements,time and space.The findings are as follows: Yang's version increases the number of nouns while Hawkes' version raises the number of modal particles in dealing with paralanguage.Besides,Hawkes' translation enhance the adoption of uncommon English expressions with varied and detailed description of women's facial expressions,gestures and body movements which meet the requirement of revealing and highlighting female body put forward by “body translation”.As for chronemics and proxemics,the Yangs clarify the urgency of movements within a very short period of time by adverbs while Hawkes and Minford make time more explicit in a comparatively long period of time and same emphasis is put on a more detailed reproduction of space.Chapter Six concludes the dissertation and state the significances and enlightments of this research while presents the limitations and future research prospects.The significance lies in the deep analysis of women's language and its translations,the innovation of research methods,systematic and detailed exploration of texts and new findings based on parallel corpora which bring enlightments in translation studies from the perspective of gender and gender language along with its translation.Due to the persuasiveness and controversy of certain ideas in relevant theories,the limited range of data,the not fully-developed corpus-based translation studies and the differences in the original novel versions,the research inevitably shows several limitations.The present study can be innovative in four aspects.First,the identification,transcription and digitization of women's language along with its translations and the building of a parallel corpus offer new datum to the study of Hongloumeng.Second,new theoretical knowledge has been gained in gender language especially women's language,research methodology,and language features in translated texts,translator study and gender perspective.Third,new research methods,namely the combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,detailed tagging approach,contrastive analysis and specific example illustration,are adopted in this study.Fourth,new perspective of gender can shed some light on gender language and its translations.