The Study Of Translators’ Style Based On Corpus Translation Theory

The most serious problems of translation studies are separation of qualitative researchand quantitative research, disconnection of theory research and the practice of languagetransformation, shortage of objective quantitative standard and assessment model. Thetranslation research method based on corpus can make up for the deficiency.Corpus translation research, which only has a history of almost twenty years, while inrecent years, develops stronger and stronger. Corpus translation absorbs the knowledge ofcorpus linguistics, descriptive translation studies and other related disciplines and at the sametime, constantly enriches its research contents and research methods. This research not onlyoverturns the traditional research methods of translation studies, but formed its own uniqueobject of study, broaden and deepen the denotation and connotation of the translation studies.Based on two Song Biyun and Zhang Zhenyu translations of the novel The Gay Genius,which is written by Lin Yutang, the thesis uses corpus retrieval software WordSmith tools6.0and AntConc3.1.4to analysis these two translated works from many aspects and perspectives(type/token ratio, word length, four-character idioms, lexical density, ellipsis of somecertain words, different translation of some certain words, mean sentence length, different useof function words and non—linguistic features), aims to find different styles of the twotranslators. By using corpus tools，the thesis is expected to uncover a number of consistentand statistically significant regularities of occurrences of stylistic features in the two texts.Through the quantitative and qualitative research, it is found that in the word level,Song’s version shows higher type/token ratio, larger lexical density. Thus, the impliedmeaning in original text can be fully transfered. Song’s translation passes on moreinformation with fewer tokens. Song pays more atttention to the detailed things. Zhang adoptsexplicitation of grammatical markers in the translated text. Song’s translation tends to beimplicit in grammatical markers usage which is more similar to Chinese expression habits.Zhang’s translation is more inclined to the expression habits of original text. He tends toadopt literal translation method while Song prefer free translation method.Levels of style can be placed under five general headings: phonological, lexical,syntactic textual and rhetorical levels. The case study concerns about lexical，syntactic，textualand nonlinguistic feature of the two translations. So it is not exhaustive in identifying all stylemarkers of the two translations.