A Corpus-based Study On Translation Styles

Shanhaijing(hereinafter referred to as SHJ),is a unique and invaluable ancient Chinese classic which contains various precious materials about Chinese ancient mythology,geography,religion,flora,fauna,minerals,medicine and so on.As a book containing such abundant knowledge from various aspects,SHJ has attracted studies home and abroad on ancient geography,history,mythology,astronomy,flora,fauna,religion,archaeology,ethnology,etc.And thus came into being several translations overseas.The Classic of Mountains and Seas translated by Anne Birrell in 1999 is the most popular version by now,and the latest translation is Wang Hong's The Classic of Mountains and Seas published in 2010.Translation style can be interpreted as the preferred or recurring linguistic and non-linguistic patterns of the translator shown in the translated text under the effect and influence of various elements.Traditional studies on translation style tend to be based on intuition and subjective feelings,while the corpus-based method emphasizes the combination of data statistics and theoretical analysis,which effectively makes up for the shortcomings of traditional translation studies.Based on its scientificity and objectivity,the paper adopts the corpus method to conduct a thorough research on the two versions of SHJ.The current study chooses Anne Birrell's and Wang Hong's English translations of SHJ as the research object,and through corpus tools,Birrell's and Wang's translation styles in the translation of SHJ are analyzed in depth from the lexical,syntactic and textual level.The research found out that Birrell and Wang do show their different translation styles in the translation of SHJ.On the lexical level,it is found that the vocabulary in Birrell's version is slightly richer and Wang tends to use shorter words than Birrell;on the syntactic level,Birrell prefers shorter sentence patterns,and tend to translate one long sentence into two or three short sentences;on the textual level,it is uncovered that Wang tends to emphasize more on therepresentation of cohesion from the aspect of conjunction and references,while Birrell applies more substitutions than Wang.Furthermore,the reasons lie behind the translation styles are also discussed from the aspects of cultural background,translation purpose and translation strategy.It is hoped that the analytical model and methods proposed in the thesis can be of some help to other similar researches,which may further promote the development and perfection of corpus-based studies on translation style.