The Research Of Huang Xinqu’s Translating Style In His Abridged English Version Of A Dream Of Red Mansions Based On Corpus Analysis

Hong Lou Meng, as the treasure of Chinese art and culture, whose English translation has been researched by many scholars both at home and abroad, but are mainly the completed version and not the abridged version. Professor Huang Xinqu’s abridged A Dream of Red Mansions, as the only Chinese-English abridgement of Hong Lou Meng in the world, enjoys few attentions and few people have given a systematical and integrated study, they are mainly restricted to the vocabularies and sentences which are also short of systemic and objectivity. Few people have given an analysis of translating style under the guidance of Skopos theory and what translating strategies the translator adopts. In this thesis, the author tries to analyze Huang Xinqu’s translating style from macroscopic and microscopic perspective respectively and explore what translating strategies that Huang Xinxu adopts based on Skopos rule and Liu Miqing’s theory of translating style with the help of corpus technique. According to Liu Miqing’s the Theory of Translating Style, in order to achieve the adaptability and corresponding performance of translating style of the original ones, translator must first be able to observe and recognize the original work’s writing style. So the author first gives a research of Chinese style from the selective style of chapter, paragraph and sentence of Huang Xinqu’s abridged A Dream of Red Mansions respectively through the process of selection, editing and translated narration of the original Hong Lou Meng. The author finds that in the selection of the chapter, Huang Xinqu is under the guidance of text theme: partings and reunions of the main characters, that is the love tragedy between Baoyu and his two cousins, and miserable fate of those typical women in Jia Mansion. In the editing and translated narration of paragraph and sentence, Huang Xinqu is consistent with his writing purpose, that is to offer a shorter version so as to serve as an appetizer for those who cannot afford the time and energy to read through the thick volumes of the completed translation.As the research of English translating style, with the help of corpus technique, the author first from macroscopic view, such as type/token ratio, lexical density, sentence alignment and average sentence length, gives an analysis of Huang Xinqu’s English translating style and finds that this abridgement has simplified form but informative content and flexible writing style. Then from the microscopic view of lexical, syntactic and textual aspect, the author finds that in translating the characters’ name, reporting verbs and passive voice, Huang Xinqu adopts the strategy of domestication to simplify and make more readers familiar with this classical novel Hong Lou Meng.