A Stylistic Study Of Translators Translating The Chinese Classics Into English And The Identification Of Their Translatorship

Studies on translators make up an important part in translation history. At present the focus of translation studies both at home and abroad is still confined within discussions on the standards and skills of translation. As to the subjects of translation,the translators themselves, the extent and depth of research are far from satisfactory or systematic. A new method is proposed here to combine studies on translators with computer technology. Developments in corpus linguistics and machine learning have provided scientific approach and technical support for the studies on translators and their styles.Corpus-based studies will discover and induce features for text categorization through machine learning, and machine learning will give in return new perspectives and technology for corpus-based studies on translators and their styles. Corpus technology and machine learning.are the two technical routes for the stylistic study of translators and the identification of their translatorship.The dissertation has done research in the following aspects:1.Defining the concept of translating the Chinese classics into English first, and discussing the meaning, the subject and strategies involved in this field.A computer-aided key translator discovery system has been developed. Analysis and testing have been carried out on the system with the three collections of Studies on Translation of Chinese Classics into English as the material and key translators have been discovered by the system with a very positive result, providing reference for the influence and activeness of the translators.2. Setting up a qualitative framework to study translators, placing the translators in the educational background and cognitive environment. This study has tentatively proposed a concept of individualized translators considering translators' choice of source texts and the strategies they use. The cognitive perspective is proposed when examining the translation process and the use of China English is discussed when approaching translators from the cultural perspective. At last the ethical turn is suggested after combing the development of ethics in translation in China.3.Constructing both parallel and comparable corpora of translated poems by the key translators in the field of translating Chinese classics into English, and carrying-out statistic analyses on the three levels of words,sentences and discourse analysis. The dissertation did a comparative study of translators' style reflected in the different translations done by three translators of China's first long narrative poem:"Kongque dong nan fei". With Wang Rongpei's version as the main object of study while using Waley's and Xu Yuanchong's versions for comparison, the present research did a multi-dimensional analysis of the translators'style at levels of words, sentences and discourse based on the self-constructed corpora..4.Carrying out translator identification experiments with the stylistic features induced from the corpus-based stylistic study of the former chapter, providing a method for the identification of translators for unidentified versions. With the translated text features as a 31-dimensioned feature set, a Vector Space Model (VSM) has been set up and three stages of experiments have been carried out with five different classifiers. First is the translators' text categorization with the common classifier for writers' text classification, achieving acceptable accuracy. Then comes the multi-layered translators' text categorization with the enlarged attribute set of 31 dimensions,all with accuracy greatly improved.Finally we have done the categorization experiment with the attribute set after the Information Gain. The result achieved is that the complexity has been reduced, time consumed has been shortened and the accuracy of the identification has been obviously improved.