A Corpus-based Study On Translator’s Style Of Guo Moruo’s Translation Of The Science Of Life

The Science of Life is a masterpiece of natural science with approximately 584,000 words mainly written by H.G.Wells with the help of Julian S.Huxley and G.P.Wells in 1920 s.Its words are simple but profound.It covers merely every aspect of man’s knowledge of biological sciences at that time.It has been considered to be of great importance and significance to the history of the natural science.With a large amount of translations in his life,Guo Moruo played an important role in introducing western thoughts and knowledge into China.It took him six years to complete the translation The Science of Life from 1930 to 1936 when China witnessed a great change in every aspect and was in badly need of scientific knowledge.The book covers a total of over 1 million Chinese characters which account for one-sixth of Guo’s whole amount of translation in his life.Therefore,we can say that it is a great translation of science texts.In addition to his great contribution to Chinese translation,he tried to build his own translation theory.As a result,he gradually established his own translation style which,of course,was manifested in his translation of The Science of Life.However,till now,there is very few studies on his translation of this book.It has been about two decades since Pro.Mona Baker tried to build a methodology of corpus-based translation study.As the development of analysis techniques,corpus-based translation study has become more and more practical.In the last decades,the corpus-based translation study has been developed rapidly.Given that it can provide a series of statistic data,its resulting research would be more objective and convincing.The translator’s style has always been a part of translation research.However,under the conventional theory structure,the translator has always been an invisible participator.Oppositely,in the case of corpus-based translation study,translation research has been transformed from the source-language-centered to the target-language centered.Meanwhile,the translator enters the stage of translation activities and becomes the leading part.With the help of corpus-based methodology,the personal characteristics of translators will be revealed through a large amount of corpus analysis and data statistics.In this paper,Guo Moruo’s translation style in The Science of Life and the possible influence factors on his translation will be the object of the study,through which we can know the advantages and deficiencies of his translation of this book which,in turn,will be an inspiration for us to improve our translation.