A Diachronic Corpus-based Study Of The Three Chinese Versions Of Wuthering Heights

It is usually the case that a classical work may have many versions in a language community, and the versions might be quite different from each other under the influence of the ever-changing socio-cultural environment and the evolution of the target language. Traditional multiversion analysis is usually done through exemplification, with much attention being paid on the equivalence between the original work and the translation, both in meaning and in form. Analysis done in this way is limited in scope and cannot compare the versions in a comprehensive way.Based on descriptive translation theories, this thesis attempts to make a comparison of the three Chinese versions of Wuthering Heights, which make a small diachronic corpus. And also the author tries to explain the reasons that cause the differences of the versions from the perspective of sociocultural environment and the development of the target language.The thesis makes a statistics of the characteristics of the three versions of Wuthering Heights on lexical and syntactic levels and attempts to explain the reason of the differences. The major findings are listed as follows. On lexical level, the later version, Zhang's version provides a bigger lexical variation. The difference of mean word length of the three versions is not significant:the proportion of poly-syllabic words in Zhang's version is higher than those of Liang's and Yang's versions which may results from the influence of the increase of poly-syllabic words. Concerning to the application of idioms, its proportion in Zhang's version is remarkably higher than that in the other two versions. As to the use of the personal pronouns, there are much more possessive pronouns in Zhang's version than the other two versions. The source language English is featured by hypotaxis while Chinese by parataxis. Subject is necessary in English sentences while sentences without subject are common in Chinese. In Liang's and Yang's version, a large number of the structure "verb+者"are applied while in Zhang's version, there are few. According to Wang Li, the structure "verb+者"is a symbol of foreignization and the appearance of "它们" in Chinese also resulted from the influence of European languages, that is, a result of foreignization. Therefore, it can be concluded from the lexical characteristics that Zhang's version tend to be more domesticating than the earlier versions, Liang's and Yang's version.On syntactic level, the analysis focuses on two aspects:the sentence length (including sentence segments) and the passive voice. The sentence length of Zhang's version is longer than those of Liang's and Yang's version while the number of sentence segments is also larger. As to the length of sentence segments, there is no big difference among the three versions which equips the three versions of high readability. As to the passive constructions, the thesis mainly focus on the use those with the passive symbol "bei", finding that the frequency in the earlier versions, Liang's and Yang's versions, is higher than that in Zhang's version. This may result from the influence of the source language English. Therefore, the conclusion also that Zhang's version tended to apply the domesticating strategy while the other two tended to apply foreignizing strategy.The socio-cultural factors that resulting in the different choice of translating strategy may include the relationship between the source and target language, the socio-cultural environment of the specific historical period and the development of the target language.