A Data-based Stylistic Analysis Of MLC And The English Version Of PRC

With the flourishing of international trade and shipping business,seafarers,as the main maritime force,play a more and more important role in maritime activities. Maritime Labour Convention,2006 is adopted to achieve worldwide protection for all seafarers and to give them the ability to have their concerns addressed where conditions fail to meet the requirements of the Convention.When Convention has just passed, China implements the core of the Conventions through domestic legislation and formulates Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Seafarers,which manifests China's maritime administration's performance capability has been walking in the forefront of the world.Both of them concern seafarers' rights,duties,management. However,translating PRC from Chinese to English is important for China to set global image.Thus,studying the English version of PRC is of great necessity.This paper tries to avail itself of theories of stylistics and corpus-assisted methods to make a detailed description and analysis of the two English data at lexical,syntactic, textual level respectively to achieve the evaluation of the English version of PRC.This study suggests that:(1) Both PRC and MLC prefer long and complex words and their overlapping words of top 50 words are extremely approximate though PRC is less varied in vocabulary.Moreover,word class distribution in the two texts demonstrates that the objective style of them accords with legal English.(2) Despite the similarities in using coordinators and subordinators of the two texts, the passive voice and modal verbs used in MLC are much more than that of PRC.In other words,influenced by the Old English,MLC is objective and neutral enough;PRC is subjective and discriminating but modern and straightforward.(3) Rare adoption of rhetoric devices and abundant use of complicated cohesive devices are the main characteristics showed in PRC and MLC.However,the structure of PRC is cursory and general because of its deficient content.Generally speaking,there are significant differences between PRC and MLC although some stylistic characteristics are the same.