A Corpus-based Stylistic Study On The Differences Between Ken Liu’s Translated The Three-Body Problem And His Non-translated English Science Fictions

In 2015,The Three-Body Problem won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award for “Best Novel”,which demonstrates that Chinese science fiction literature has begun to stand on the world stage.Ken Liu,the translator of this science fiction,gets all the credit.Domestic and global scholars have studied the English translation of The Three-Body Problem from several perspectives,like translation strategies,translator’s subjectivity,and literature analysis,while few have from the perspective of corpus stylistics.The advantage of corpus stylistics is that it can function qualitatively and quantitatively and provide objective and reliable statistical analysis.This thesis finds the simplification features in translator’s translation from the perspective of corpus stylistics by comparing the differences between The Three-Body Problem translated by Ken Liu and his original texts.This thesis attempts to explore what exact differences in language style between Ken Liu’s translation and his non-translated works.The author constructs Ken Liu’s The Three-Body Problem into an observation corpus and his five original English science fictions into a reference corpus,and the results are as follows.At the lexical level,lexical variety,lexical density and information carried by vocabulary in The Three-Body Problem are lower than the reference corpus,and the comprehensibility is higher.At the syntactic level,the sentence length of The Three-Body Problem is short,reducing the reading burden of the readers.At the textual level,The Three-Body Problem is easier to read than the reference corpus.Ken Liu is good at using punctuation skillfully,and the text style of The Three-Body Problem is formal.Moreover,the differences in these three levels confirm the trend of translation simplification,and the objective data are used to reveal the significant difference between Ken Liu’s translation features and his writing style with advanced intuition and reliability.It is suggested that future studies should explore more reasons affecting stylistic features by expanding the analysis of translators,cultural and social factors.