A Corpus-based Study Of The Style Of A Literary Translator

In2001, UNESCO proclaimed Kunqu opera as a "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity," yet the secrets of that heritage are kept by only a few aging masters in even fewer schools and institutions. As one of the most famous Kunqu operas, The Peony Pavilion, a beautiful love story written by Tang Xianzu, has created some buzz throughout the world and plays an irreplaceable role in Chinese traditional literature and culture spreading. Aided by the popularity of Kunqu opera, the lyrical original script of The Peony Pavilion weaves a fabric of nuances and metaphors what elegantly surpasses the boundary between the beauty of nature and man’s inner cosmos of emotions and desires. Although conventional in its narrative structure, especially for its deus ex machina ending, The Peony Pavilion features highly refined and subtle script and is hailed as a high point in Chinese traditional literature. The magic of the play’s language quickly carries the audience to a unique experience of literary and musical pleasure. For these reasons the play’s script poses a daunting challenge to attempts at their translation.Over years, different English translations of The Peony Pavilion have been studied by scholars from the fields of linguistics and translation but never in the field of corpus translation studies (CTS). The style of a literary translator is a very interesting subfield of the translation studies. The impact of the translator’s style on a translated text has been debated for a long time, which is a relatively neglected topic in the literary translation. However, corpus analysis methods offer the possibility of quantifying the influence of the individual literary translator on the translated text.There are many published versions of the English translation of The Peony Pavilion. But in this study, two important translations will be concerned. They are:the first English translation of The Peony Pavilion, translated by Cyril Birch in1980published by Indiana University Press and the latest English translation of The Peony Pavilion from a Chinese Translator, Wang Rongpei, published by Shanghai Foreign Education Press. These two versions are somehow representative and typical in reflecting not only the style of authors themselves but also the influence from different ideologies or culture backgrounds. This thesis will be conducted on the basis of data collection and analysis of a small-scale parallel corpus of the two English translations of The Peony Pavilion in which the texts are aligned according to actors’lines. To reach this goal, ST and TTs should be made machine-readable and proofread, and a parallel corpus should be compiled and annotated. Based on methods of CTS, this study aims to analyze the style of literary translators in the two English translations at different levels:lexical level, syntactical level and discourse level, with which the combination of the quantitative and qualitative research methods, the data about the Std. TTR (standardized type token ratio), lexical density, mean word length, mean sentence length and so on will be collected from the parallel corpus to be used in the qualitative analysis.