A Study Of Four Chinese Versions Of Jane Eyre With The Corpus Approach

Jane Eyre has had several translation versions since its introduction into China in 1935.For the study of these versions, the qualitative approach has been employed by most researchersto make a comparative analysis by extracting the original sentences, paragraphs or chapters andtheir corresponding translations. Detailed enough though, this kind of research often leads tomisunderstandings of the translations without good sampling.Of the many versions, the works of Zhu Qingying in 1980 and Huang Yuanshen in 1993enjoy the most popularity among readers. The 1994 version of Huang Shuren and that of SongZhaolin the next year also gained positive comments from readers and have been reprinted manytimes.In the current research, the author tries to use a combination of quantitative and qualitativemethods in accordance with description of Translation Corpus Translation Studies research andtheory, to make a detailed analysis, comparison and description of the four mentioned translatedworks. Moreover, the author tries to verify the existence of"translation universals": thesimplification and explicitation tendency. The author uses the results from the description andcomparison of the four translations with the corpus approach to compare with the statistics of thelarge corpus in order to ensure the comprehensive nature of the study, and show the languagecharacteristics and the unique habits of translators.At the same time, with qualitative and quantitative analysis, the author also makes the genderof the four translators as a starting point to see whether there are differences between male andfemale translators when they deal with gender language from the perspective of sociolinguistics.The study shows that:(1) In general, all the four Chinese versions of Jane Eyre have clear simplification andexplicitation tendency. Huang Shuren's version has more variations in vocabulary. For lexical variation, Chinese versions tend to use fewer content words and show a preference to use acertain number of words. The probably explanation is that translators try to use simple languageand common words in their translations. The above characteristics lead to the use of languages intranslation glossary low density. However, the four versions are not significantly different inswearwords.(2) At the syntactic level: translation of the average sentence length is longer than the originalChinese text; text dialogue analysis showed that translation in the use of the word when there isdifference in tone, to some extent, reflects the style of the translator. The two female translatorstend to use more expletives than their male counterparts.