A Contrastive Study Of Two English Versions Of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan From The Perspective Of Munday’s Systemic Model For Descriptive Translation Studies

From the perspective of Munday’s systemic model for descriptive translation studies, the thesis intends to make a contrastive study of the two English versions of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan given by the Yangs and Lyell. It is dedicated to deduce the possible motivations of translation shifts. Through analyzing the sociocultural contexts of the ST and TTs and discussing the lexical grammatical realizations of three metafunctions of TTs aided by the tools of corpus linguistics, the thesis finds the sociocultural factors influencing the decision-making process in translating, produces tables of types, tokens, type-token ratio and word frequency lists of the two versions and generalizes the translational tendencies in realizing three metafunctions of each version. In conclusion, the Yangs take the introduction of Chinese culture into account and produce a version with the translational tendency of simplification. Lexically, it translates the ST into many common English equivalents or simpler expressions with plenty of repetitions or even omissions of words and phrases. In translating sentence structures, the Yangs tend to adpot the translation technique of changing active voices to passive ones and that of degrading; Lyell values readers’complete comprehension of the original story, adding the version with his own understanding of the ST in many places. The translational tendency of his version is explicitation with more exhausting diction. It has many specified hyponyms and less repetition and omissions. In terms of translations of sentence structures, Lyell is inclined to employ the translation techniques of process shifting and upgrading.