A Corpus-based Study Of Liu Shicong’s Translation Style

Translation has been viewed as a derivative rather than creative activity in traditional translation studies and style is often associated with source text or source text authors. Little attention has been paid to the description of the style of a translator for a long time.With the development of descriptive translation studies (DTS), translation is no longer considered as a process of text transfer from the source language to the target language. In contrast to prescriptive translation studies, DTS has broadened the horizon of translation studies by shifting its focus to the target language, and the social, cultural and ideological background against which the target language is used, thus offering new perspectives for translation studies. The combination of DTS and corpus linguistics provides a solid theoretical foundation and the technical support to the corpus-based study of translator style. With the help of corpora, statistical analysis of long translational texts can be carried out through which linguistic features and stylistic patterns that a translator prefers, such as word frequency, sentence length, and collocations can be identified.The present study is an empirical, corpus-based study, which investigates the style of the translator Liu Shicong through a small scale corpus composed of most of Liu’s translation works of Chinese prose and two other comparable corpora. With the help of corpus retrieval and analysis software suite WordSmith4.0, Liu’s translation style is investigated at two linguistic levels: lexical and syntactic, and is compared with that of another famous Chinese translator on the one hand and that of native English speakers on the other. The findings of the study show that in addition to maintaining the style of the original texts, Liu’s translation is characterized by his own unique style, for example, the preference for ordinary, everyday words and simple sentence structures. This style proves that Liu Shicong himself is practicing the writing and translation principle he has advocated. i.e."Concision is the Virtue of Writing".The results of the present study also show that an empirical study like this is useful for scientific analysis of translator’s style by combining quantitative approach with qualitative one so that it is possible to make systematic comparisons of the data obtained. It can provide researchers and critics of translation with a powerful tool and reliable data, thus rendering their analyses objectivity and persuasive power and avoiding the subjectivity and unsystematic and intuitive comments of the traditional studies.