Corpus-based Approach To Investigating The Style Of A Translator

For a long time, translation has been viewed as a derivative rather than creative activity and style is associated with source text or source text authors. Little attention has been paid to describe the style of a translator.With the development of descriptive translation studies (DTS), translation is no longer considered as a static process of text transfer from the source language to the target language. Descriptive translation studies (DTS) broadens the horizon of translation studies by shifting its focus to target-orientedness and target culture in contrast to prescriptive translation studies. It provides a theoretical framework for Corpus-based Translation Studies.Taking an empirical approach to the description of naturally-occurring language, corpus linguistics provides a completely new method for linguistic research. The availability of large corpora of both original and translated texts, together with the development of a corpus-based methodology, forms a new paradigm in translation studies. With the help of corpora, statistical analysis of long translational texts can be carried out through which linguistic features and stylistic patterns of a translator such as word frequency, sentence length and collocations can be identified.My present study is an attempt to make an empirical study to investigate the style of a translator with a case study of the two English versions of Cha Guan by compiling small corpora. A corpus-based study is carried out to examine style factors of the two translators across those levels: lexical level, syntactic level and textual level. The findings elaborate the linguistic preferences of the two translators.At the lexical level we find: the diction in Ying Ruocheng's version has more variance than that in Howard's version and the lexical variance in Howard's version is closer to that of native speaker's than that of Ying Ruocheng's; Ying Ruocheng simplifies his version by reducing content words to achieve acceptability and readability, while Howard employs more content words in his version to cover as much information of the source text as possible which objectively increases the difficulty of his version; there are not many differences in the use of top 10 words and variance occurs in the second 20 words.At the syntactic level, Ying Ruocheng's translated sentences tend to be more concise and terse, while Howard's ones tend to be more explicit and precise; Ying Ruocheng's version is close to the source text Cha Guan in nearly all punctuation marks while Howard has a very heavy use of period, question mark and dash, yet a lack in the use of exclamatory mark compared with the source text Cha Guan.At the textual level, narrow variance and heavy use of high frequency connectors characterize both versions; Howard's version employs more connectors to achieve unity and cohesion; Ying Ruocheng's version is rather loose in structure than Howard's.Corpus-based empirical study to the investigation of the style of a translator is helpful to explore the style of the target text scientifically and to analyze them comprehensively. This study involving quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpus data provides not only a new yet effective approach to the investigation of the style of a translator but also some evidences supporting subjectivity of translators and translation universals.