A Corpus-Based Investigation Of Translator’s Style

This thesis is a descriptive study of the style of Ren Rongrong as a translator of children’s literature based on corpus analysis of small-scaled self-built corpora. The analysis is carried out to investigate the linguistic features of the texts included in the corpora that are assumed to be able to reflect the individual style of a translator according to the methodology of the corpus-based studies of translator’s style. The study of translator’s style based on corpus analysis is first proposed by Mona Baker who believes that individual literary translators have distinctive style of their own. After Baker’s efforts, the investigations of translator’s style have been broadened and deepened. More detailed principles have been established to describe translator’s style, but it is still necessary to improve this field of study to make it more mature and more systematic.This study clarifies the research questions and methods, depicts Translation Studies from the perspective of stylistics, discusses the development of corpus-based studies of translator’s style, and aims to work out an effective way to describe and analyze the style of Ren Rongrong by the way of building comparable corpora. The analysis is mainly approached through the investigation of basic statistics of the corpora such as standerdised type/token ratio and mean sentence length, and specific linguistic items such as use of lexis, use of rhetorical devices and use of deixis.The research findings indicate that Ren Rongrong has his own preferred and repeated linguistic choices that are obviously different from his original writing for children and also from the other translator Yang Jingyuan in this thesis. The result suggests that Ren Rongrong tends to deliver rich information load in his translations; he prefers to use foreignized, explicit grammatical construction to make the texts readable; the translator is also loyal to the originals and is not likely to add any explicit personal sentimentality or emotion to the originals; the translator attempts to create a fictional reality of the narrative and tries to draw the readers’ attention to the world within the narratives; considering the readability of the translator’s works, it is assumed that readers with high independent reading ability will enjoy the translations better.