A Corpus-based Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Lin Yutang’s My Country And My People

Lin Yutang, with profound knowledge of Western and Eastern culture, is a world-famouswriter. My Country and My People is one of Lin Yutang’s English works that had great influencein the Western world and won great reputation for him, which was regarded as a window forforeigners to know China and Chinese culture. Many essays have been done on this work fromdifferent perspectives. However, little attention has been paid to study the comparisons betweenthe two Chinese versions. Many essays have put their emphasis on the content and thesignificance and its retranslation which mainly adopted the qualitative method of analysis byobserving grammar, vocabulary, rhetoric devices as well as stylistic features in translated texts.However, this traditional method of translation analysis is of a little help to discover the overallfeatures of translated text, and is limited in scope.In order to compare the differences between the two Chinese versions (Huang Jiade’sversion and Hao&Shen’s version) of My Country and My People from the stylistic point ofview at two levels, that is, lexical level and syntactical level, the author attempts to remedy theshortcomings of qualitative analysis in the previous studies by combining the quantitativeanalysis and qualitative analysis. Therefore, parallel corpora based on the materials of MyCountry and My People and its two Chinese versions translated by Huang Jiade and HaoZhidong&Shen Yihong respectively are built and aligned at sentence level to do the quantitativeanalysis with the concordancing tools, AntConc and ParaConc.In this thesis, the author attempts to analyze the differences between the two Chineseversions at the lexical level (lexical density, word length, POS distribution and culture specificwords) and the syntactical level (average sentence length and Europeanized Chinese). Based onthe analysis and comparison, the theory of translational norms has been used to analyze thedifferences in two Chinese versions and explain the factors behind the differences.Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the two Chinese versions, the majorfindings are: explicitation is more obvious in Huang’s version than in Hao&Shen’s both at thelexical level and the syntactic level while simplification is more obvious in Hao&Shen’sversion than in Huang’s. Explicitation in Huang’s version at the lexical level is attributed to theuse of more nouns and some explanatory information. At the syntactic level, the extension ofsentences and changes of word order contribute to explicitation in Huang’s version.Simplification in Hao&Shen’s version lies in adopting literal translation which, to some extent,departure from the style of the source text. The author also finds that the language in Hao&Shen’s version shows a more obvious tendency toward Europeanization.