A Corpus-based Study On Stylistic Features Of Five Chinese Retranslations Of Jane Eyre

According to the “Retranslation Hypothesis”,the first translations of literary works tend to apply the strategy of domesticating translation while that of foreignizing translation is likely to be preferred by the subsequent retranslated versions,and thus retranslations get closer to the source text.Given that prior studies in the field of retranslation mainly focus on theoretical discussion but lack empirical studies,the present study selected the source text of Jane Eyre and its five translation versions in different years to build a corpus,in an effort to quantitatively verify the “Retranslation Hypothesis” in terms of stylistic features based on four typical quantitative indicators,including Type-Token Ratio（TTR）,Standard Type-Token Ratio（STTR）,Content Words Density and Average Sentence Length.The results of this research indicate that compared with early translations the later translations do not get closer to the source text,which contradict the claim of “Retranslation Hypothesis”.It is reasoned that the two-dimension model of “source text-target text” of “Retranslation Hypothesis” ignores the fact that translator’s subjectivity has tremendous influence on the stylistic feature of the translation text,thus the present study proposes the Dynamic Translation Hypothesis based on a three-dimension model of “source text-target text-translator”.