A Corpus-Based Study On Eileen Chang's Style Of Self-translation

Translation practice has long been viewed as a derivative rather than a creative activity.Hence translators only reproduce the style of the original text.With the development of translation studies,people are gaining insights into the nature of translation activities.Translators' style has become one of the research foci of translation studies.A translator's style refers to the fingerprint left by the translator in the process of translation,that is to say,the selection of translation strategies and preferential expressions.Main representatives such as Holmes and Toury suggest using Descriptive Translation Studies(DTS)to investigate translators' style.The corpus-based translation studies reject the traditional and subjective research mode,making it possible for the comprehensive and objective studies on translators'style.Hsia Chih-tsing considers Eileen Chang one of the most important writers of China in the twentieth century.Researches on Eileen Chang are mainly on her literary side,while the studies on Eileen Chang's style in translation are insufficient.Therefore,this thesis intends to analyze Eileen Chang's style of self-translation,by applying the theories of corpus-based translation studies and descriptive translation studies,which can lay a foundation for large-scale studies of a translator's style.On this account,Eileen Chang's self-translation Shame,Amah!(????�?????)is selected as the research object in this thesis,and compared with Australian sinologist Simon Patton's translation,and some of Eileen Chang's English writings in order to unveil her style in translation.The analysis has been done through micro,meso and macro levels.At the micro level,analysis has been focused on lexis and syntax.At the meso level,studies are mainly on translation concepts and strategies.At the macro level,analysis includes readability analysis and ideological perspectives.Through analyzing statistics and examples,we have found that:at lexical level,Eileen Chang skillfully uses various words,especially,short ones.At syntactic level,Eileen Chang prefers long well-balanced sentences characteristic of being short,informal and popular,showing a style of simplicity and brevity.As far as translation strategy is concerned,EileenChang tends to paraphrase reduplicated words,but she would use the translation strategies of Pinyin and literal translation to render salutation and culture-loaded words so that she could provide adequate cultural background information and make the translation easier for Western readers to understand.At the macro level,Eileen Chang would avoid the existing concepts and use more understandable words when dealing with some words related to political images.As a result,the target readers' requirements are met.This thesis conducts a study on Eileen Chang's style of self-translation through effectively combining the corpus-based quantitative analysis with translation studies,which serve as references for the studies related to the translators' style and corpus linguistics translation studies.