A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Three English Translations Of Liu Xie's Wenxin Diaolong

This paper examines the speculation about the superiority of sinologist translators based on their recent success in the overseas promotion of Chinese literature and develops a methodology based on the corpus-based translation studies to evaluate further the speculation.To conduct the research,this thesis choses the three representative English translations of Wenxin Diaolong by Liu Xie,namely,the translations respectively produced by the bilingual translator Vincent Yu-Chun Shih,the native Chinese translator Yang Guobin,and the Sinologist Stephen Owen.Based on the comparative analysis of the three translations,the traditional approaches of corpus-based translation studies,and the cuttingedge sentiment analysis borrowed from natural language processing,this research finds that on certain subjects proposed by the corpus-based translation studies,certain textual and syntactic features of the translated texts by a Sinologist translator resembles that of the original English writings in a better way,while the comparison of some other subjects remain vague and unable to show that there are significant differences between the three translations.Moreover,the sentiment analysis of the three translations proves that the Sinologist translator Stephen Owen outperforms his counterparts with regard to handling sentimental elements because his translation is much closer to the original writings in that aspect.