A Corpus-Based Study Of The Translator’s Style In Two English Versions Of Lao CAN You Ji

With the development of descriptive translation studies,studies on the translator’s style have attracted and will continue to attract a lot of attention worldwide.With the emergence and development of the corpus,studies on the translator’s style tend to be increasingly scientific,systematic and objective.The corpus-based method can avoid subjective judgments and impressions by offering large amounts of authentic data,which is different from the traditional study on the translator’s style.Lao Can You Ji,written by Liu E,is regarded as one of the most representative works of Chinese literature.The two translations selected in this study are the most accepted and best approved English versions of this book translated by Yang Xianyi & Glady Yang and Harold Shadik.So far few studies have paid close attention to the translator’s style in the translations of Lao Can You Ji based on a corpus.Therefore,this thesis intends to conduct a comparative analysis on the two translations of Lao Can You Ji by constructing two parallel corpora,aiming at investigating distinctive styles of the Yangs and Shadick.Based on large amounts of authentic data,the analyses in this study are descriptive and objective.The thesis includes five chapters.The first chapter introduces the background,objectives,research questions and significance of this study as well as the organization of the thesis.The second chapter tells about literature review that focuses on the studies on different translations of Lao Can You Ji,the translator’s style and corpus-based studies on the translator’s style.The third chapter elaborates the research methodology of this study,including corpus construction and research instruments.The fourth chapter carries out a comparative analysis on two English versions of Lao Can You Ji at the lexical,syntactic and textual levels respectively,so as to investigate the features of the translator’s style.This chapter also sheds light on the factors affecting the formation of the translator’s style.The last chapter is the conclusion of this study.It also points out some limitations in this study and offers some suggestions for the future study.The major findings of this study are as follows.It is found that translators do leave special fingerprints in their translations.At the lexical level,Shadick’s translation is higher in the standardized type-token ratio,longer in average word length,and richer in lexical density.The high-frequency words are used more often in the Yangs’ translation.At the syntactic level,compared with Shadick’s translation,the Yangs’ translation is longer in average sentence length and more complicated in the sentence structure.At the textual level,the Yangs’ translation adopts more reference words,while Shadick’s translation is more readable.Based on these findings,this thesis comes to the following conclusions.On the one hand,the Yangs’ version is simpler and more explicit in word expressions,but more complex and grammatically cohesive in sentences and the text.On the other hand,Shadick’s version is richer in vocabulary variety and the words employed by Shadick are more complicated and informative.Nevertheless,it is simpler in sentence structure and more readable in the text.This study also finds out the factors which affect the translator’s style.And the factors mainly lie in the thinking mode,the purpose of translation,translation norms as well as language transfer.