A Corpus-Based Study Of Translators’ Styles In Three English Versions Of Li Qingzhao’s Tz’u

This thesis focuses on the study of the translator’s style. For a long time, translation was regarded as an imitative activity rather than a creative one. In traditional stylistic studies, the focus was on the representation of the style of the source text while the translator’s style was seriously neglected. With the emergence of the cultural turn, researchers have gradually shifted their attention from the source text and the writer to the translated version and the translator. Translation is a cross-cultural operation for the realization of a specific purpose under a given historical environment rather than a simple transformation between two languages. As a receptor of the source text as well as a creator of the translated text, it is impossible for the translator to be truly invisible and he is bound to leave traces in the translated text, which is the translator’s style. As descriptive translation studies develop, corpus-based translation studies come into being as a new research paradigm on the basis of corpus linguistics. Guided by linguistic theories and translation theories, it takes large-scale translated texts as the data source and probability and statistics as the instrument. Introducing corpus into translation studies enables researchers to generalize the features and rules on the basis of data analysis, which can make up for the subjectivity and one-sidedness of traditional translation studies. Up till now, corpus has been widely applied to translation studies, among which corpus-based translation studies on the translator’s style have aroused increasing interest among the translation community.As the greatest ancient poetess, Li Qingzhao occupies an irreplaceable role in Chinese literary history. Since 1926, when Li’s tz’u poems entered the western world for the first time, over fifty translators at home and abroad have engaged in the translation of Li Qingzhao’s tz’u poems. A large number of translated versions produced by them have triggered the interests of the academia. A number of theories such as the principle of Beauty in Three Aspects, hermeneutics, the theory of intertextuality, the cognitive schema theory have been applied to the analysis of the translation of Li Qingzhao’s tz’u poetry. The research objects have covered translatability, translation strategies, the translator’s psychological process, the intertextual relevance, similar-structure cohesion and so on. It is worth noticing that the translator’s style of Li Qingzhao’s tz’u poetry has been rarely touched upon. The successful cases of applying corpus to the study of the translator’s style of various genres have laid a solid foundation for this study. Despite the fact that the corpus-based translation studies have made great progress, a complete research system has not been formed for the reason that the emphasis is put on the linguistic aspect of the translator’s style while the non-linguistic aspect is neglected to some extent.Under the theoretical framework of the translator’s style proposed by Mona Baker, this study builds a small-scale corpus of three English versions of Li Qingzhao’s tz’u poems(respectively by Xu Yuanchong, Mao Yumei and Kenneth Rexroth). Their unique styles in linguistic and non-linguistic aspects are investigated with the aids of corpus-based analytical tools and by the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. It also attempts to provide possible explanations for the formation of these translators’ unique styles.The thesis starts with an introduction of the research background, significance, goal and the overall research design. The literature review covers the history and the status quo of the study of the translator’s style and the translation of Li Qingzhao’s tz’u poetry and on the basis of that, the research gap is pointed out. The section of theoretical framework elaborates the definition and research range of the translator’s style, and the traditional and the corpus-based approaches to the translator’s style. Then, a comparative study is conducted on the translator’s style in linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of Xu Yuanchong, Mao Yumei and Kenneth Rexroth. The translator’s style in the linguistic aspect is studied in terms of lexical, syntactical and textual features. The translator’s style in the non-linguistic aspect is analyzed in terms of prefaces and postscripts, annotations and translation strategies of Ci Pai. At last, the possible factors contributing to the formation of the translator’s style are explored based on the comparative analysis mentioned above.The findings are as follows: each of the three translators has his or her distinctive style. Xu emphasizes the transmission of the beauty of poetic language and the creation of a good reading experience, which is testified by the fact that his translated version is characterized with the highest lexical variety and density, the relatively complicatedsentence structure, more sentences expressing strong emotions, the fewest annotations, and the semantic translation of Ci Pai. Kenneth underlines the manifestation of images, imitates the montage Chinese poetic language features, and tends to add his personal interpretation in translation, which is shown by such features of his translation as the most frequent usage of nouns and sentences of simple structures, and the annotations used to clarify his personal interpretation. Mao stresses the promotion of traditional Chinese culture, and keeps interpretation within the poems to a minimum, which is reflected in the preface consisting of the most abundant information, a huge number of annotations introducing Chinese culture and transliteration of cultural-loaded words and Ci Pai. The three translators have one thing in common, that is, high readability, the reason of which lies in the fact that they all preserve the poetess’ s usage of colloquialism. Based on the exploration of the style of the three translators, it is found that the source text, the translator’s personal factors and the target culture are the possible reasons for the formation of the translator’s style.The significance of this study, first of all, is that it provides a relatively complete research framework, which can offer some hints for future researches; second, this study can also be beneficial in translation training and practices. Translation practitioners can learn from the style of master translators so as to improve their own translation; last, translation teachers can also evaluate their students’ translation works by the application of corpus.