Styles Of Translated Detective Fiction ——A Corpus-based Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd

For a long time,detective fiction has been a popular literary subject for readers at home and abroad.The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,a representative work of the famous detective novelist,Agatha Christie,is an inseparable topic when people focus on such research.Many domestic and foreign scholars have explored the translation and translation style of Agatha Christie’s detective fiction from different theoretical perspectives,and many significant research results have been achieved.However,most of the existing studies on the translation of Agatha Christie’s detective fiction are limited to subjective qualitative analysis,which is carried out from the perspectives of manipulation,linguistic meta-function,conversational meaning and narrative perspective,summarizing the characteristics of different translations or further analyzing factors which influence their translation styles.Few studies in this aspect have used corpus-based quantitative statistics combined with qualitative description methods so as to systematically investigate the translation styles of different translated works.In this study,a small parallel corpus is constructed,consisting of the original text of Agatha Christie’s masterpiece,The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,Zhang Jiangyun’s translation published by People’s Literature Press in 2006,Xin Kejia’s translation published by People’s Literature Press in 2009,and Chang He’s translation published by New Star Press in 2013.The study compares the three Chinese translations at macro levels in lexical and syntactic aspects.It further compares them in translation style at four micro levels—psychological（mind style）,ideological,spatio-temporal,and phraseological—and investigates the factors affecting the translation styles.It is found that:（1）at the lexical level,Zhang’s translation ranks 1st among the three translations in terms of the number of tokens and the proportion of function words in the total number of tokens,while Xin’s translation has the largest number of types,four-character words and the highest STTR;（2）at the syntactic level,Zhang’s translation has the largest number of sentences and paragraphs and the longest average paragraph length;Xin’s translation boasts the longest average sentence length;Chang’s translation has the shortest average sentence length and paragraph length among the three translations;（3）at the psychological（mind style）level,Zhang retains the transitivity of the original text to the greatest extent,while Xin and Chang tend to change the relations between subject and object of the original text;（4）at the ideological level,Zhang retains the modal verbs in the original text to the greatest extent;（5）at the spatio-temporal level,Xin and Chang prefer to retain the sentence structure of the original text;（6）at the phraseological level,Zhang lacks the awareness of distinguishing personal pronouns,and all of the three translations barely preserve the original verbal characteristics.Thanks to better preservation of the original structure in Zhang’s work,the narrative shifts in his translation do not change much compared with the other two translations.By contrast,Xin leaves the most prominent translator’s voice in his work,shifting narratives more often,and exerting the most influence on the readers for them to access the information expressed by Agatha Christie.