A Corpus-based Stylistic Study Of Chinese Versions Of Hamlet

Owing to influence of subjective or objective factors, translators tend to choose specific words and sentence structures. Translator's style could be manifested in these words or sentence structures. This thesis studies translator's style taking the Chinese translations of Hamlet as an example under corpus-based approach.So far, there have been more than forty Chinese translations of Hamlet which provide materials for diachronic analysis of translator's style. This thesis chooses three translations:"Ha Mu Lei Te" translated by Liang Shiqiu in 1930s; "Ha Mu Lai Te" translated by Zhu Shenghao in 1940s;"Dan Mai Wang Zi Ha Mu Lei Te Bei Ju" translated by Bian Zhilin in 1950s. At the same time, screenplay of film "Wang Zi Fu Chou Ji" (1948) will be mentioned.Most current analysis on translator's style is based on close reading, Hamlet and its translations included. It is generally acknowledged that Liang's translation is plain, and lack of beauty and elegance; Zhu's translation is simple, smooth and filled with spoken language; Bian's translation is regarded as the best although it has amount of translationese.This thesis is a corpus-based analysis of Hamlet and its three translations. The linguistic features of these three translators are analyzed on lexical and syntactic levels. In the end of this thesis, the factors that influenced translators will be analyzed.The major findings are listed as follows:At lexical level:TTR is much higher in Bian's translation than Liang and Zhu's translations; the frequency of monosyllabic words is much higher in Zhu's translation than Liang's and Bian's translations; there are more personal pronouns in Zhu's translation than the other two translations and lines of the film; there are few "它" in Liang's translation compared with Zhu's and Bian's translations; Bian used amount of ChengYu and Beijing local vocabulary; Liang tended to use rare words and association patterns while Zhu and Bian tended to use common vocabulary; Zhu and Bian tended to adopt replacement of obscene vocabulary while Liang didn't avoid these words.At syntactic level:in average sentence length, Liang's is the shortest, Zhu's is the longest; There are amount of translationese in Zhu's and Liang's translations which are few in Bian's translation; Bian used more emotional words and interjections.The findings are of great difference from the common acknowledgement of the three translations. For Liang's translation, the average sentence length is the shortest, and the word usage is variety. For Zhu's translation, there are amount of translationese and the sentence length is the longest which is not easy to understand. At the same time, its monosyllabic words frequency is the highest among these three translations. For Bian's translation, there are amount of ChengYu and Beijing local vocabulary, and few European vocabulary and translationese. Bian's translation is more domesticating compared with Zhu's and Liang's translations.After all, Zhu's translation is influenced by English grammar most. Bian's translation is more domesticating while Liang and Zhu's translations are more foreignizing. The factors that influenced translator's style include individual translation principles, target language grammar, language features and dominant culture.