A Comparative Study Of The Two English Versions Of VolumeⅠof The Selected Works Of Mao Tse-tung-A Statistics-based Approach

The purpose of this thesis is to make a comparative study of the two major English versions (the Wishart & Lawrence (WL) version, 1954 and the Foreign Language Press (FLP) version, 1965) of Volume I of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung to explore some lexical and syntactic features in the original text and the above-mentioned two English versions, and investigate which version is closer to the original text in terms of the stylistic features in question.This thesis mainly adopts a statistics-based approach. The lexical features in question include: the total number of types, the total numbers of tokens, type/token ratio, the total number of sentences, average sentence length, word length and readability. The syntactic features in question include: coordinating sentences and compound sentences, passive structures, attributive clauses and conditional clauses.The paper concludes that compared with the WL version, the FLP version tends to use fewer words, shorter words and sentences containing fewer words, and the FLP version generally follows the lexical and syntactic features of the original text.