A Corpus-based Study On The Translators' Style In The Two English Versions Of Chen Zhong De Chi Bang

With the development of descriptive translation studies,the research on the translators' style is attached an importance to by the scholars in translation all over the world.Especially Mona Baker applied the corpus-based translation into the research on the translators' style in the early 1990 s.A great many researches on translators' style with the corpus-based translation approach begin to carry out.The new method makes the research on the translators' style more systematic and more comprehensive.Different from the traditional method,it combines the qualitative analysis with the quantitat ive statistics with the aid of the corpus software Wordsmith tools etc.The study of the English versions of Chen Zhong De Chi Bang adopts the empirical methodology used in corpus-based translation studies.Self-designed and small-scaled,the parallel corpus consists of the two English versions: Leaden Wings translated by Gladys Yang and Heavy wings translated by Howard Goldblatt.By using WordSmith Tools to retrieve data from the corpora,the researcher starts to investigate the two distinctive translators' styles from three aspects: lexical level,syntactic level and textual level and finds out the reasons for the differences between two translators' style.The main findings are got as follows: as far as lexical level is concerned,the study focuses on uncovering features of lexical diversity in the two English versions,which covers standardized type-token ratio,the statistical study of word frequency,average length and lexical density.The finding is that the vocabulary in Gladys' version is more vario us than that in Goldblatt's version,which shows a higher standard of inter-language explicitation,compared with Gladys Yang's version.It can also be seen that Gladys Yang's version is shortened.In terms of syntactic level,sentence length and the complexity of sentences are investigated.It's found that Goldblatt prefers to write long complex sentences,while Gladys tends to use short compound sentences.And for the textual level,two aspects are covered,including reference and the causal conjunctions.The study finds that the Gladys'version takes a lower percentage than that of Goldblatt's in the use of reference and adverbial connectors,which can also show that Goldblatt's version is better written in a proper logical sequence by means of using more conjunctions and it can be easier interpreted than that of in the Gladys Yang's version.The author also explores the reasons for the differences between the two translators' style,that is to say,the different cultural identity and attitudes of the two translators are embodied in both of their choices of the translation strategy and language forms.The Gladys' version in form and content agrees with the source text,while in order to satisfy the reading habit and psychology of the westerners,Goldblatt's version partly adjust the narrative view and character description of the source,on the basis of being faithful to the source content.The present thesis is carried out with corpus–based translation approach,which contributes to making the research more objective and persuading.What's more,the result concluded also aims to provide suggestions for the future study.