The Translator's Style In Two Chinese Versions Of A Clean, Well-lighted Place-from The Perspective Of Translation Shift

Translation has traditionally been viewed as a derivative activity, as opposed to the writing of originals, which is considered as a creative activity. Meanwhile translators are regarded as "invisible" in the translated works. But over the last decades, many translation scholars and translation theorists have started to take into account the visibility of translator since Lawrence Venuti used the term 'invisibility' to describe both the effect of the translator's discourse and the practice by publishers, reviewers, readers, etc.(O'Sullivan, 2003,198) To address this topic, a translation shift model is employed in this thesis as a methodology to explore how the translator's style is made visible in the translated texts.This thesis begins with a brief introduction to two widely-known representatives concerning the study of translator's style. They are Theo Hermans and Mona Baker. Hermans introduced the concept of the translator's voice which accounts for the "other voice" or an "index of the Translator's discursive presence in situations where s/he has to come out of the shadows and directly intervene in a text, which the reader had been led to believe, spoke only with one voice". (Hermans, 1996: 27) And Mona Baker recently introduced another concept, that of the translator's style, which indicates a kind of thumb-print that is expressed in a range of linguistic- as well as non-linguistic-features. This term follows and complements Herman's notion of the translator's voice. Thus this dissertation will adopt the term translator's style which refers to translator's discursive presence in the translated texts and the typical expression manner of a translator.This thesis, then, presents Van Leuven-Zwart's model for translation shift analysis, which even if not designed in the first place to trace the presence of translators in their work, can easily be used to find concrete examples that provide systematic data to unveil this presence in a translated text. This model regards translation as a decision-making process. Thus it goes beyond the traditional way of investigating the style of a literary translator, which focus on the translation result-the translated texts, only by calculating the differences between originals and translations in relation to such features as lexical and syntactic patterns(the type / token ratio), punctuation and average sentence length, and neglecting the effect of translators' choice of strategies on the style in translated texts during the process of translation. In order to test the feasibility of exploring translator's style in English-Chinese translation by following Leuven-Zwart's model, two Chinese versions of Ernest Hemingway's short story A Clean, Well-lighted Place are chosen in for a case study in this dissertation.Meanwhile, in order to pave the way for data analysis on the translator's style, abrief introduction of Hemingway and his short story A Clean, Well-lighted Place is conducted, as well as the two translators-Cao Yong, Wang Yuerui—and their translations.Based on the above discussion, data are collected from these two versions by following Leuven-Zwart's model for translation shift analysis and then fitted to the study of the translator's style. It is found that the two translators adopted these strategies which cause shifts in the target text (TT). According to Leuven-Zwart, these shifts lead to a change in the metafunctions of the TT. As it is the translator who decides to change the textual metafunctions, this dissertation argues that the narrator's voice in the TT is made present by such changes.Moreover, these data manifest that there exists Mona Baker's universal features of translated text, i.e. explicitation, simplification, and normalisation, in the two Chinese versions of A Clean, Well-lighted Place. However, different translators differ from each other in degree of shift and method so far as the discursive present of translators' style in translated text is concerned.Therefore, this thesis explores the deeper features of the translator's style, not the surface features of the whole text, through the analysis of shift as translators' choice during the process of translation. And finally, it also testifies that the presence of translator's style is inevitable.