Translation Universals And Translator’s Style

The Classic of Poetry is the earliest poetry anthology in China and a typical representative of classical Chinese poetry. Its translations open up a window for both the foreigners and modern Chinese people to get a deep insight into Chinese culture. By taking The Classic of Poetry as an example, this study aims to acquire some specific linguistic features of the translations of classical Chinese poetry, to verify the existence of translation universals in the translation of classical Chinese poetry, to study the similarity and difference among the three translators’styles, and finally to explore the causes or influencing factors of such translators’styles.A monolingual comparable corpus which is constituted by two sub-corpora will be constructed. One of the sub-corpora is composed of three complete English translations of The Classic of Poetry, and the other comprises native Romantic English poems. The latter sub-corpus serves as a reference corpus. Statistics of standardized type/token ratio, lexical density, high frequency words, mean sentence length and also the detailed data of the use of pronouns and grammatical notations in both sub-corpora will be obtained through WordSmith Tools and compared between the two sub-corpora and also the three translations themselves to study the translation universals and translator’s style.The major findings are as follows:Firstly, as for the verification of translation universals, it is found that the translations of The Classic of Poetry show a tendency of simplification, explicitation, normalization and implicitation. Furthermore, in terms of style, it is shown that the translation of Legge, a British translator, shows a tendency of normalization while those of the Chinese translators show a tendency of "source language shinning through".Secondly, with regard to the investigation of translator’s style, three translators translate the source poems into different styles. Legge translated the poems in a style of prose while Xu, Wang and Ren translated the poems in a rhymed style rather similar to the source text in sense, sound and form.Hence, it can be concluded that there versions do exist translator’s style in the translation of classical Chinese poetry. In terms of the causes, this study figured out that the translator’s style may be affected by a number of factors such as the cultural and social background of the translator, his translation purpose, his intended readers, and finally his viewpoints to poetry translation.With the integration of both qualitative and quantitative descriptive analyses, this study could objectively justify and affirm the very existence of translation universals and translator’s style. Besides, it could provide some statistical data as references for the theoretical studies in the future.