A Comparative Study On Translation Style In Two Chinese Versions Of Heart Of Darkness From The Viewpoints Of Corpus And Stylistics

We study the style of Conrad because it tells us something about Conrad as a literary artist.Recent researches on Heart of Darkness mainly focus on its linguistic patterns with corpus tools.This paper combines the concern of aesthetic appreciation with that of linguistic description.The thesis makes a corpus-based comparison of the translation styles manifested in Huang Yushi's(2014)and Sun Lizhong(2005)translated versions of Heart of Darkness in terms of macro-linguistic features and their representation of style markers.The findings demonstrate: 1)corpus statistics show that Sun's version has a higher TTR than that of Huang because of his smaller translation text against another.The STTR shows little difference,which may imply narrow variance of lexical complexity.Also,Sun prefers writing longer sentences,shown by his less use of periods and excessive use of comma than Huang.The data may suggest that Sun and Huang do not have much difference only by virtue of corpus data.2)Qualitative analysis shows that Huang and Sun have different strategies in dealing with the style markers.At lexical level,Huang pays more emphasis on the representation of deixis and illogicality than Sun.Huang has noticed the ironic elements in the original,expressed the complexity of character's traits and pushed forward the themes of imperialism and savagery.Sun's adaptation,for the pursuit of plainness and coherence,fails to carry over the illogically ironic markers;At syntactic level,Conrad's hastening of pace is well matched by Huang's translation.However,in some cases,Sun does not adhere to hastening the pace and drop the dashes.Also,the omission of Conrad's parallelism is found in Sun's version;At the level of figures of speech,the two translators show a tendency of reproducing,similizing and converting to sense in translating metaphors.In translating similes,addition and sequencing are employed in Huang's translation,and there are some mistakes in the simile translation by the two translators.3)The study suggest stylistic research of translation should not be confined to quantitative description and focus should be directed to literary stylistics in the literary translation of fiction.