A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Of Translation Style Of Caigentan's Two English Versions

Caigentan,written by Hong Yingming in the Ming Dynasty,encompasses the truths of Confucianism,Buddhism and Taoism and the way of life.It is a masterpiece full of wisdom and philosophy of life.It exerts an extensive and lasting social impact on China and gives the world a lot of enlightenment.Its form is the aphorism and the language is concise,vivid,profound and intriguing.Style is the overall feature of the artistic expression technique that reflects the ideological contents of the work,and it is inseparable from the content.Therefore,in order to make the target language readers and the original readers have similar reading and aesthetic experience,it is equally important for the translators of Caigentan to faithfully convey the original content and properly convey the original style.The first English translation of Caigentan came into being in 1926.Nowadays,there are more than ten English translated versions.Among them,published in 2001,Paul White's version is widely loved by the western readers,and its revised edition is included in the the Library of Chinese Classics in 2003.Zhou Wenbiao's English-Chinese bilingual edition was published in 2008.It is a relatively recent English translation of Caigentan.And its translation quality is recognized by many translators and readers.These two English versions both have their own characteristics in translation style,thus worthy of study.This thesis takes Zhou's version and White's 2003 revised edition of Caigentan as the research object,builds the small corpus,and uses corpus analytical tools to compare the two translations by quantitative research and qualitative analysis.According to the form markers in the stylistic marker theory,with the use of WordSmith and AntConc,the statistics of White's and Zhou's translation are calculated at three levels: lexical,syntactical and textual levels,and the comparative study is carried out.The research found that White's and Zhou's versions have a similar word variety,and White tends to use shorter words and shorter sentences,better maintaining the conciseness of the source text;while Zhou's translation uses more clauses.In addition,Zhou's and White's versions respectively maintain the interrogative and exclamatory tones of the original text to a great extent.In terms of textual cohesion,White uses more personal pronoun reference in his translation,among which “you” is the most frequently used,shortening the distance between the readers and him,while in Zhou's version,“it” is the most frequently used personal pronoun,resulting in a more objective translation style.In addition,Zhou uses more connective words and phrases in his translation,making it more coherent.The factors in the differences in translation style are translator's subjectivity,habitual language uses and applications of translation strategies.This research is an attempt to explore the combination of corpus research and translation style features,and it provides a new perspective for the studies of the English translation of Caigentan.It also provides a reference for the corpus research of English translations of Chinese classic books.