A Research On Translator Style:A Case Study Of Three English Versions Of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan

Traditionally translation has been regarded as an imitative rather than creative activity by the translators,which highlights the translation's faithfulness to the original text and the retaining of the source text's style.Therefore,translators' creativity and their habitual language use have been greatly ignored.With the development of translation studies,especially the rising of descriptive translation studies,translation is no longer considered as a process of simple transference from the source language to the target language.Translator style receives more attention,providing a new perspective to translation studies.Based on Saldanha's methodological framework for investigating translator's style in literary translation,this thesis intends to compare and analyze both the source-type and the target-type translator style of Yang Xianyi,William Lyell and Julia Lovell reflected in their translations of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan.From the perspective of the target-type style,three comparable corpora have been built,with BNC Baby Fiction as reference corpus.And the qualitative discussions from the lexical,syntactical and textual level with quantitative analysis are carried out.From the perspective of the source-type style,it explores speech presentation and culture-loaded words,and analyzes their translation strategies with the help of parallel corpora.Through the statistical analysis and discussion,this study finds that three translators display distinctive translation style in their translations of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan and some major features of their translations are presented.First,from the perspective of the target-text type style,at the lexical level:1)as to STTR,Lovell's ratio is highest while Yang's lowest,and Yang has the lowest lexical variability.2)with regard to word length,Lovell employs the longest words while Lyell uses the shortest words.3)in terms of word frequency and high frequency words,there is a close correspondence between the three translations and native English expressions.4)on the subject of lexical density,Lyell prefers to use lexical words or content words.However,Lovell employs more grammatical words.At the syntactical level:1)the mean sentence length of the three translations is significantly higher than that of the original English texts.Yang has the longest sentence length.2)in terms of complex sentences,Lovell employs fewest complex sentences.And Yang tends to use more complex sentence than Lyell.3)on the subject of punctuation marks,Yang and Lovell are faithful to the usage of punctuation in the source text.Lyell makes adjustment on the usage of punctuation marks for Lyell prefers to use dash and bracket in the translation.4)in terms of contracted forms,Yang prefers to use full forms while Lyell uses the contracted forms most frequently.At the Textual Style:1)in respect of reference,Lovell prefers to use personal reference rather than demonstrative,while Lyell uses them to the contrary.2)as to conjunction,Yang has highest frequency whereas Lovell lowest.Among three kinds of conjunctions,adversative conjunctions are mostly favored by three translators.3)on the subject of substitution,Lyell has the most preference for the nominal substitution compared with other two translators.4)in terms of readability,three versions are more difficult than the native English texts.Among them,the most difficult one is Lovell's version.Second,in terms of the source-text type translator style:1)as to speech presentation:Yang's and Lyell's modes of speech presentation are as much faithful to the original as possible,and they would adoptappropriate speech presentation according to the context.Lovell prefers to make flexible adjustments,especially ellipsis.However,sometimes Lovell makes inappropriate adjustment,without considering the effect of speech presentation.2)with regard to cultural-loaded words,Yang tends to adopt the combination of literal and free translation,while Lyell prefers to use footnote.And Lovell employs various approaches,such as omission,free translation and the combination of literal translation and free translation.The research significance of this study is to provide a comprehensive study on translator style and verify the feasibility of research framework put forward by Saldanha.And the research itself can serve as an empirical case for translator style study.