| The corpus linguistics, together with the statistics computed by the software, can show the stylistic features of the translated works, which has been recognized by the scholars at home and abroad. Tangshi Sanbai Shou, for having a high reputation for its integrity and literary value, has been translated into many English versions, among which the most renowned are Xu Yuanchong's Three hundred Tang poems (Xu's version) and Witter Bynner's The jade mountain (Bynner's version). This thesis conducts a tentative research on the differences of the two translators' styles on the basis of the self-built parallel corpora of Xu's version and Bynner's version by answering the questions as follows:1. What are Xu Yuanchong's and Witter Bynner's stylistic features at the lexical, syntactic, and textual levels as respectively reflected in Xu's version and Bynner's version?2. What are the reasons that can account for the differences of Xu Yuanchong's and Witter Bynner's styles?Results show that lexically Xu's version bears a slightly high STTR, low percentage of words of high frequency, and a low percentage of long and complex words, from which the conclusion can be drawn that Xu's version is comparatively short, brief, concise, tidy, and tends to use the content words to simplify and popularize the Chinese poems, thus keeping the style of the source poems. On the contrary, Bynner's version is long, diverse, grammatically complete, thus formal and complicated for its high percentage of functional words and long and complex words. Bynner's version, though acceptable, is artificial and uneasy to read.Syntactically speaking, Xu's version prefers to translate the source text liberally and adopt short simple sentences with less use of conjunctions and subordinators, thus succinct and close to the style of the source text. Bynner's version favors literal translation and tends to employ long and hierarchical structures with more use of conjunctions and subordinators, thus having a tendency of formality and syntactic variety.Textually, Xu's version has high Reading Ease and lower Text Difficulty. Xu Yuanchong takes the form of verse translation, thus making Xu's version comparatively facile, neat, elegant and melodious, which consists with the style of the source text and also helps the readers appreciate the beauty of the Chinese classic poems and the Chinese culture. Bynner's version has low Reading Ease and high Text Difficulty with a common narrative structure, somewhat common, arduous and unorganized as well as lacking elegance and melody. Although grammatical and easy to understand, it's not as beautiful as Xu's version for its failing to deliver the true implications and art of the Chinese classical poems.Cultural background, difference of the two languages, and the two translators' own experiences and knowledge can account for their disparate styles.As for implications, theoretically speaking, the present study can somewhat enrich the stylistic research on Chinese-English poetry translation, for it further proves the feasibility of corpus stylistics combined with translation studies to demonstrate some specific stylistic features at different levels. Pedagogically speaking, it may promote the teaching and learning in terms of translation. Practically speaking, the research can theoretically guide the translation practice so as to achieve good translation, which will most probably contribute to the spread of the Chinese poems as well as the Chinese culture. |
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