Font Size: a A A

A Corpus-aided Study On Style Transference Of The Old Man And The Sea

Posted on:2010-04-15Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L L WangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360272498969Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's works that has earned world fame and the Nobel Prize for him.Many critics have tried to decode them from different angles.Although much has been done,sometimes controversially,little attention has been paid to the style and artistic skills.Many emphases have been put on the qualitative method of analysis by observing grammar,vocabulary,rhetoric devices as well as stylistic features.However,the observation of these stylistic features can not reveal the overall features.Generally,the traditional ways of analysis is limited in scope, which sets back the efforts to fully account of style transference.In order to analyze the features of Hemingway's works The Old Man and the Sea from the stylistic point of view at three levels,namely,the lexical level,the syntactic level and the textual level,the author tries to compensate for the shortcomings of qualitative analysis in the previous studies by combining the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis.Therefore,two parallel corpora of EWPARA(The Old Man and the Sea and Wu Lao' translation version) and EZPARA(The Old Man and the Sea and Zhao Shaowei's version) are built to do the quantitative analysis with the concordancing tools,ACWT,AntConc,and ParaConc.This thesis,through the comparison of the two versions translated by Wu Lao and Zhao Shaowei,has studied the stylistic transference of The Old Man and the Sea from the perspective of Nida's functional equivalence theory with the aid of the parallel corpora EWPARA and EZPARA.Analysis of the merits and the demerits of the two Chinese versions in the style transference of The Old Man and the Sea have been made in the thesis.At the same time,the research into universals of translation has also been done to prove the existence of universals of translation by the two corpora and the concordancing programs listed above..Through the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis of the two versions,the results are that Zhao's version is better than Wu's in explicitation and normalization, While Wu's version is better than Zhao's in simplification.Wu's simplification at the lexical level and literal translation cause,to some extent,departure from the style of the source text,and his mechanical formal equivalence and lower degree of normalization make his translation difficult to understand.Meanwhile,the lower explicitation results in the unclear way of expression.However,Zhao's version is better almost in these aspects.Zhao's version realizes functional equivalence by free translation and abandons the control over the usage of language either in colloquial conversation or depiction to make the translation simple but tasteful,and keeps the exotic flavor by retaining the foreign words and explaining them with footnotes.Zhao does his best to fulfill the functional equivalence in form and meaning.However,Wu sometimes achieves content equivalence on the surface,but overlooks the "functional equivalence".In this way,he sometimes engenders the loss of meaning with the aim of attaining formal equivalence, and damages the exotic flavor by normalizing foreign words.In a word,the style transferred by Wu Lao is to some degree forfeited by his conformance to formal equivalence.It can be concluded that Zhao's version is better than Wu's version by achieving functional equivalence and realizing style transference.The thesis has proved that the style transference is transferable;and the corpus-aided study on translation has the advantages of testing the universals of translations and Nida's function equivalence has a directive effect on the evaluation and comparison of translation versions.
Keywords/Search Tags:Style Transference, Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory, Universals of Translations, The Old Man and the Sea, Corpus
PDF Full Text Request
Related items