Writers’ Translation Vs. Professional Translators’Translation

Translators’ style mainly concerns the description of literary translators or translator groups’ unique linguistic features. Baker considers style as a kind of "thumb-print" identified by a range of linguistic and non-linguistic features, including his/her choice of the type of material to translate, his/her consistent use of specific translating strategies, the use of prefaces or afterwards, footnotes and so on. With the development of the information technology and corpus linguistics, translation theorists began to adopt corpora in Translation Studies, describing the attributes and characteristics of translation. Armed with the corpora, researchers have undertaken quantitative research into translators’ style and conducted statistical analysis of the translator’s language, such as word length, lexical changes, word frequency, and sentence length and so on. Thus, the translator’s style can be studied and demonstrated from a more rational and objective perspective. This basically goes beyond the qualitative research method in traditional translation studies, which relies heavily on intuition and personal judgment. Corpus approaches have greatly improved the width, depth and credibility of previous studies. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses brings the research into translators’ style to a new phase.On the basis of the corpus-based approach and four Chinese versions, the study attempts to offer a descriptive analysis of the translators’ style of the two translator groups of The Old Man and the Sea. More precisely, the writer group under the present study is composed of Yu Guangzhong and Zhang Ailing, while the professional translator group is made up of Huang Yuanshen and Li Wenjun. Combining quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis, the present study explores whether the two groups of translators have their distinctive features in translating The Old Man and the Sea.After the detailed analyses, the following findings are obtained:I. At the lexical level:(1) There arc no remarkable differences in lexical variation between the writer translators and the professional translators;(2) In dealing with the Spanish words, the writer translators tend to interpret those Spanish words into Chinese by literal translation, free translation and transliteration, while the professional translators often directly transplant the Spanish words, transplant the Spanish words with footnotes or translate them into Chinese with footnotes;(3) In regards to the variations of female pronouns (she/her), the writer translators are more inclined to retain Hemingway’s abnormal linguistic forms and emotional colors by decoding them into“她”or“她的”,whereas the professional translators tend to omit the variations and interpret them into objective and emotionless“它”or“它的”；(4)On account of the formal non-correspondence in mood between English and Chinese, sometimes the implicit mood in English has to be made explicit by addition of Chinese modal particles in order to realize the dynamic balance of emotional expression. Compared with the writer translators, the professional translators prefer to make a compensation by adding Chinese modal particles, such as“呢”,“么”,“啊”,“呀”,“吧”,“嘛”to highlight the mood and emotion in the original text. This divergence especially lies in translating the addressing term,"fish", in the old man’s monologue:the professional translators incline to employ more Chinese modal particles at the end of the noun fish (鱼),as“鱼呀”or“鱼啊”,while the writer group choose to employ’“鱼”or“大鱼”。II. In terms of the syntactic level, by exemplifying and analyzing the average sentence length, translations of compound sentences, attributive clauses and the prayer (a kind of specially formulated functional sentence), we can conclude that the professional translators tend to show a colloquial, concise and fluent style with simple words, expressions and idiomatic usage, while the writer translators often employ formal and poetic words and expressions in a polished manner.On the basis of the corpus-based approach, the study takes two different translator groups as the research object, compares their versions by a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, and explores their distinctive characteristics in the translations. It enriches the research into translators’style as well as Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and also offers some guidance for translation practice.