| Liaozhaizhiyi,a collection of folk stories and anecdotes by Pu Songling,is treasured as the pinnacle of classic Chinese novels boasting multitudes of social implications and cultural values.Of over 20 foreign translations,Rose Quong’s,John Minford’s,and Sidney L.Sondergard’s versions are of significant influence.Their distinct translators’ styles bring about great research value for translation studies of Chinese classical literature,particularly for the exploration of translator’s style.Translator’s style refers to the “fingerprints” left by the translator in the process of translation,covering writing style,translation methods,translation conventions,and language use.Based on the corpus-based approach,this thesis makes a comparative study of the three versions of Yingning to examine the linguistic characteristics embodied in the translation.Apart from that,the investigation of the target readers’ responses is also involved.Based on the acceptability,this thesis attempts to figure out translation methods and strategies that are more acceptable to target readers,hoping to provide more references for the translation of Chinese classics concerned.Aided by the corpus tool Coh-Metrix,it is found that: At lexical level,Quong’s version favors words of short length with a higher word frequency,while Minford’s version and Sondergard’s version embrace more lexical diversity,and Sondergard’s vocabulary is simpler in semantics;At syntactic level,sentence structure is of more complexity in Quong’s version,and Minford’s version has more segmentation with simpler sentence structure;At discoursal level,Quong’s translation is of great cohesion by virtue of utilizing cohesive devices such as conjunctions,referential cohesion,and latent semantics,while Minford’s translation has the lowest cohesion.The questionnaire survey reveals that Quong’s translation is the most accepted by respondents while Minford’s translation gains more acceptability at the syntactic level.Finally,combined with readers’ feedback,it can be concluded that Quong is inclined to take a domestication strategy to recreate a concise and fluent translation.Minford adopts translation amplification to communicate more culture-loaded information from the source text,and he combines the strategies of foreignization and domestication but with more weight put on the former;Sondergard’s version is characterized by simple and straightforward expression,faithful to the original text with more inclination to foreignization.Based on the integrated analysis of translator’s style and the acceptability of target readers,this study attempts to put forward feasible translation strategies for the reproduction of Chinese Classics.The translation is supposed to conform to the target language and gives prominence to the fluency and cohesion of the text with well-refined language.Nonetheless,it does not suggest the ignorance of the “foreign element” in the original work.The results of the questionnaire survey reveal that target readers show a strong interest in foreign cultures,based on which translators could adopt amplification and explanatory translation to appropriately foreignize culture-loaded elements.In other words,domestication is suggested to be adopted as the priority,while foreignization can be appropriately adopted in the processing of cultural communication,in which case exotic cultural flavor in the source text can be preserved to stimulate the interests of target readers. |
