A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Features Of The English Versions Of Fu Sheng Liu Ji

Fu Sheng Liu Ji(????),an autobiography with great literary value and artistic inspiration in Qing Dynasty,is a love story full of romance and art of living.With its fresh and sincere style,the work played the unique and significant role in the classical literature of Qing Dynasty.Since the publication of Lin Yutang's excellent translation of this work,many scholars have successively translated this classical literary work to western readers.So far,the three versions translated by Lin Yutang,Leonard Pratt and Graham Sanders have been widely circulated,which have been the most representative versions.However,few scholars have made the comparative studies on the lexical features on the work until now,while they paid less attention to Graham Sanders'version.Meanwhile,the study of lexical features is also an indispensable part of corpus translation studies in the field of translation style.Therefore,lexical features are the focus of this study.Through the comparison of three self-built corpora,the“big data”of three versions can be decoded,thus further revealing the“genes”of translator's lexical feature,which is helpful to analyze and discuss the differences in their translation process.In the past,the translation studies for this work mainly focused on the qualitative analysis.With the aid of self-built and small-sized ChineseEnglish parallel corpora and quantitative analysis method,this paper based on the empirical research methodology of Mona Baker's corpus translation studies have captured the scientific and reliable data of three versions,and would make a diachronic comparative analysis of Lin's,Pratt's and Sander's versions by using relevant quantitative parameters,so as to explore and discover the similarities and differences of lexical features and translation methods of three versions.In the process,the research methods of corpus translation studies and relevant tool softwares will be applied to make statistics and analysis on the quantitative parameters of lexical features such as part-of-speech distribution,lexical density,STTR,average word length and lexical readability,high-frequency words.Combined with relevant translation cases,the difference and fluctuation trend of lexical features in three versions will be investigated,so that the “personal imprint” left by translators can be discovered at the lexical level.The study will be beneficial to make the reference for the practical exploration of corpus translation studies,and also provides ideas and methods for teaching and research,and is also helpful for further in-depth study on translator's style in the future.The analysis results show that the lexical features of three versions have certain similarities,and the general trend is basically the same.At the same time,there are obvious differences at the lexical level as follows: In Lin's translation,Yutang preferred nouns and prepositions to verbs.In readability,his version is the most difficult to read,which is more suitable for students of 9-11 grade level.The lexical variation,word length and lexical density in his version are moderate between the other two.Additionally,he preferred 1-letter words and high-frequency words such as “the”,“and”,“a” and “of”.There are more obvious nominalization tendency and normalization characteristics in Lin's translation;In Pratt's translation,conjunctions,3-letter words and notional words are used most widely,which has been the version with the highest degree of hypotaxis and the maximum lexical density.Meanwhile,the simple words with fewer letters are given priority in his translation.With the fewest complex words and the minimum lexical length and variation,it shows that Pratt's version has the best readability.His translation is concise,natural and easy to understand and has the simplified characteristics,which is suitable for the junior students of 7-9 grade level to read;In Sanders' translation,Graham preferred adjectives,adverbs and pronouns.The most varied words and the formal and academic style are impressive.The lengthiest average word length in his version shows that its vocabulary is most difficult to master.The complex words with more than 5 letters and functional words appeared most frequently in Sanders' translation.In Addition,his preferences in translation are 2-letter,4-letter words and high-frequency words of “to” and “in”.In readability,the reading difficulty in his version is close to that of Lin's,which is suitable for senior students of 8-10 grade level.Meanwhile,the lowest lexical density and the smallest proportion of notional words can be found in Sanders' version with more prominent features of explicitness.