A Corpus-Based Study Of Eva Hung’s Translator’s Style

Corpus-based translator’s style research focuses on corpus analysis and data statistics,and examines translators’ style at the language level through data statistics and quantitative analysis of a large-scale real corpus.In this paper,the own bilingual parallel corpora of Eva Hung’ translation works and their original Chinese texts have been built,and the investigations on the translator’s style through quantitative and qualitative analysis have been carried out.The study uses the Eva Hung’s translations of Love in a Small Town,Love on a Barren Mountain,and Trances of Love and its source texts as the materials of the corpus,and builds the bilingual parallel corpus,while taking the Translation English Corpus(TEC),The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese(LCMC)and the Chinese-English Parallel Corpus(CEPC)as references,to examine the linguistic features of Eva Hung’s translation at three levels: lexical,syntactic and discourse.The results show that:(1)Lexical level: the STTRs of Eva Hung’s translation is low,the average word length is short,the lexical density is high,and the word frequency distribution is generally consistent with that of translated English.Further comparisons show that the high lexical density is a reproduction of the source text,while the low STTRs is a choice of Eva Hung;(2)Syntactic level: the mean sentence length of Eva Hung’s translation is long and complexity of sentence are high.This is mainly due to the influence of the source text;(3)Discourse level: The cohesive devices are used frequently in Eva Hung’s translation,and the most commonly used cohesive device is the reference,of which,the personal reference is used extensively.In addition,a large number of case studies have been carried out through the method of text close reading to further conduct a descriptive study of Eva Hung’s translator’s style,whose findings are generally consistent with the quantitative results of the corpora: Eva Hung’s omission of unimportant information,the simplification of class word,and the various treatments of cultural-gapped words result in a translation that is less difficult and less rich in vocabulary.Eva Hung’s respect for the syntactic structure of the original text results in long sentences,and the translation is coherent and readable due to the abundance of cohesive devices.In conclusion,Eva Hung’s translation is concise in vocabulary,natural in cohesion and fluent in reading.Adopting the research paradigm of CTS and based on quantitative and qualitative research methods,this paper explores the translator’s style of Eva Hung,expands and deepens the study of Eva Hung’s translator’s style and serves as a new example for the analysis of successful cases of English translations of Chinese literary works.