A Corpus-based Study On The Translator's Self Revisions In Li Jihong's Translations Of The Birth Of Venus

The present study attempts to study Li Jihong's decision making of his self-revisions in his revised translation of The Birth of Venus and to explore what kinds of causes have an influence on self-revisions.The study conducts a corpus-based,whole scale statistical analysis of the two translations by means of calculating their respective type token ratios,lexical density,high frequency words and mean sentence length to investigate whether two translations have something different in the macro dimension.Then the study randomly selects 10 chapters out of 49 chapters by EXCEL for detailed discussion.According to statistical results from the 10 chapters,the newly published and revised translation has no significant difference with its previous translation.However,the results cannot deny the fact that some discrepancies still exist and are worth investigating.First of all,statistical results of type token ratios show us that the number of tokens in the first translation is larger than that of the revised translation.The results of lexical density exhibit that the lexis of the first translation is less various than that in the revised translation,which illustrates that the revised translation contains more information.The results of high frequency words suggest that the revised translation does not change drastically and the proportions of Li's self-revisions of content words and function words in the revised translation are quite balanced.The results of mean sentence lengths further explain that the translator did not make many changes at the level of syntactics.Apart from this,the study categorizes all self-revisions in those 10 chapters into 4 types.According to each type's occurrences,their descending order is:additions or deletions>lexical choices>syntactic modifications>error corrections.The majority of those revisions are at a lexical level;only a small part of revisions are at a syntactic level.After quantitative and qualitative analyses,it has been found that Li wanted to balance relationship between the source text and target language readers as much as possible.He would first choose to fulfill the complete realization of meaning in the source text,no matter in expressing information or in form.But when it comes to that faithful translation is against target language readers' reading habits,he would sacrifice the formal features in the source text to let his translation move closer to Chinese readers.Besides,the translator's translation thought,language competence as well as his responsible attitude all work together to explain his decision making in self-revisions.Finally,the study will shed some light on future Translation Studies by way of providing a brand new case study object that is two translations of one same translator analyzed by the methodology from Corpus-Based Translation Studies to explore decision making in self-revisions.