A Corpus-based Study Of The Translator's Style Of Julia Lovell

Sinologists have made an indelible contribution to the spread of Chinese culture and the construction of China's national image.As one of the new generations of sinologists,Julia Lovell's most significant achievement is the translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literary works.Her most famous translation is The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun,which was published by Penguin Classics in 2009.This is the first translation of Lu Xun's novels translated by a foreign translator and accepted by Western authoritative publishing organizations.Although there are other translations of Lu Xun's stories,in terms of communication effects,Lovell's version has distinctive characteristics.Therefore,studying her translated works and her translation style has practical significance both in the translation of Chinese literature and the broader spread of “Chinese Voice.”Studies of the translator's style are an emerging research field after the rise of corpus translation studies in recent years.Using the corpus-based approach to study the translator's style allow a researcher to conduct his study on the basis of corpus analysis and data statistics,thus avoiding the subjectivity and arbitrariness of studies in this field.Gideon Toury's theory of translational norms has done a multi-faceted analysis of the translator's choice in the translating process.This theory has greater relevance to the translator's style.Therefore,the discussion of Julia Lovell's translator style in this paper is under the framework of Toury's theory.Based on two self-built corpora,this thesis studies the translator's style of Julia Lovell when she translates The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun from the perspective of Toury's translational norms.The thesis examines Julia Lovell's translator style based on four data: standardised type/token ratio,average sentence length,top five high-frequency notional words,and sentences connected by em dashes.After a detailed analysis,this research summarizes some valuable discoveries of Julia Lovell's translator style.Firstly,we find that the standardised type/token ratio in Julia Lovell's translation is much higher than the reference corpus,which indicates that Julia Lovell's translation has richer vocabularies and lower lexical repetition rate.Moreover,her choice of words changes significantly,and vocabulary diversity evenly distribute throughout the corpus.The fluctuations of vocabulary are more uniform than the reference corpus.Besides,we find that Julia Lovell prefers to use sophisticated and elegant words(this feature is closer to Yang Xianyi's translation).Secondly,the results of the average sentence length show that the sentence length in Julia Lovell's translation varies greatly,and the long and short sentences are alternated frequently.These two data indicate that Julia Lovell is trying to reshape the image of modern Chinese classics in the English language through more prosperous vocabulary changes,elegant word selection,and fluent English expressions.Thirdly,the analysis of the top five high frequency notional words reveals that the theme and characters of Julia Lovell's translation matches that of the original texts.Still,Julia Lovell pays more attention to use various translation methods to retell these short stories and make them more attractive.Less attention is paid to the ideology of the original text and the preaching intention that Lu Xun wants to convey.Lastly,after studying sentences are connected by em dashes,we find that Julia Lovell makes heavy use of em dashes to achieve different semantic and pragmatic functions.At first,she uses em dashes to form the appositive structure.Next,em dashes are used to add interlinear notes so as to reduce readers' reading pressure.Moreover,em dashes are adopted to emphasize the emotion and tone of characters.According to the analysis of these four data,we find that Julia Lovell's translation generally leans towards the norms of the traditional English novels.Moreover,she fully considers the target readers' reading experience,habits,and interests and makes great efforts to enhance the fluency of the work by presenting familiar concepts to the target readers.Also,her translation intentionally weakens the deep-rooted culture in Lu Xun's novels through translation strategies such as explicitation,simplification,and omission.Meanwhile,the heavy use of em dashes indeed violates the translational norms of the target language.However,Julia Lovell's interpretation is a re-translation.This translation strategy helps her to avoid similarities,reflect a distinctive language personality,and achieve a successful re-translation.Based on these analysis studies,we have a clearer understanding of the translator's style of Julia Lovell.Meanwhile,it gives us a clue why her translation of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun is so prevalent in the Western world.