A Stylistic Analysis Of Rendered Texts Of Westminster Abbey In The Framework Of Descriptive Translation Theory

Traditional translation uses faithfulness in content and form as the ultimate criterion to evaluate translated works, thus wavering between "what is good and bad", and "what is right and wrong". Descriptive translation studies takes a different stance. While the traditional assessment somewhat ignores the fact that translation occurs under particular social and historical contexts, descriptive translation studies takes into account some vital factors such as cultural, historical contexts as well as the translators’background information such as knowledge structure, aesthetic taste and ideology. Since Mona Baker’s corpus-based studies of the translators’style, stylistic analysis in the framework of descriptive translation studies has made great achievements by collecting a large amount of data, studying the translators’ preferences, making the quantitative analysis of the factors that influence the translators’style. In so doing, aspects of society, history and ideology are also considered.The present thesis attempts to make a descriptive study on two different Chinese versions of Westminster Abbey, mainly exploring the translators’ "voice" and "fingerprints".By employing descriptive and comparative approach as methodology and by building a parallel corpus, and employing some software such as AntConc, the author intends to analyze the two different versions of Westminster Abbey from the perspective of lexical and syntactic levels. The thesis does not judge which version is better or worse, but only makes an objective description concerning the styles reflected from the rendered texts. The study reveals the two translated texts are close to the original in style, especially in dealing with lexical items. Gao and Hsia show their distinctive features. Gao tends to domesticate translation and understanding his version requires more the context. Syntactically, he is adept in achieving a syntactic rhythm through his pause theory, decomposing the surface structure of the original text, and rendering the target text quaint and concise. Hsia’s version is more faithful to the original text and easier for readers to understand the translation. His flexibility in the transfer of subject-predicate structures into topic-comment ones makes the Chinese version fluent and natural.