A Corpus-Based Study Of Carlos Rojas' S Translator Style

In recent years,with the development of corpus-based translation studies,corpus has been applied to the researches on translator style,which facilitates scientific and objective research.As a literary translator and one of the aggressive sinologists,Carlos Rojas has made great contributions to Chinese literature “going global”.Therefore,based on the translator style proposed by Mona Baker and developed by other researchers and scholars,combining the quantitative and qualitative methods,this thesis aims to explore Carlos Rojas' s translator style from lexical,syntactic and textual levels with the help of corpus and explain his style from the perspective of Carlos Rojas' s individual factors.In the research,the author chooses three representative translational works of Rojas to establish a monolingual corpus,named as CRTC,and selects fiction sub-corpora of TEC and CLOB as two comparable corpora so as to distinguish Rojas' s translator style from both other English translators' and original writers'.The research results are as follows.At lexical level,the STTR shows the lexical items in Carlos Rojas' s translations are less diversified than both other translators and original writers;in terms of lexical density,compared with other translators,Rojas' s translation features a higher information load capacity,but closer to original ones;with respect to lexical complexity,the same as original writers,lexical items in Rojas' s translation are more difficult and complicated than that in other translators' and it is found that mean word length cannot be regarded as the sole indicator to investigate one's lexical complexity;in terms of word frequency,Rojas uses less high frequency words.As for the strategies to translate lexical items,Rojas' s translation tends to be foreignization-oriented,with domestication as supplement.Specifically,apart from literal translation,Rojas also employs literal translation with annotation and transliteration with annotation to transfer the cultural meaning.At syntactic level,the result of sentence complexity shows Rojas' s sentences are featured by longer length and more complex structure.With respect to the translation strategy,in addition to translating original sentences literally,Rojas also combines short sentences into long ones,adds subordinators to explicate the logical relation between sentences,and annotates some lexical items with attributive clauses;in terms of passive voice,Rojas has no distinct features,but he prefers to convert the active voice into passive one.At textual level,in terms of cohesive devices,there is no significant difference of the references adopted,but the same as other translators,the substitutions and conjunctionstake high proportions in Rojas' s translation,which shows his inclination of explicitation;regarding readability,although Rojas' s translations are characterized by a slightly lower readability,they are still easy to be accepted.Besides,Rojas' s educational and cultural background,writer identity and translation thoughts all play crucial role in the process of shaping his own translator style.Combining quantitative and qualitative methods,this thesis explores Carlos Rojas' s translator style with the aid of corpus,which can help readers understand Rojas' s translator style in detail and can be served as an empirical and methodological case for translator style research.Besides,the author hopes that the linguistic preferences and strategies found in this thesis can be helpful for people who translate Chinese literature.