A Corpus-based Study Of Zhou Shoujuan's English-Chinese Translation

The dissertation is a corpus-based study on Zhou Shoujuan's English-Chinese short story translations.By comparing Zhou's translations with his original writings,it aims to find the consistent and systematic deviations of the translated texts.From the perspective of classical narratology,the study tries to dig through the superficial lexical and syntactic patterns and find out features in the deeper narrative structures of Zhou's translations.As one of the most productive literati in late Qing and early Republican Shanghai,Zhou Shoujuan translated and wrote hundreds and thousands of short stories,and edited many periodicals with great circulation at that time.By resorting to distinctive translation strategies,Zhou Shoujuan aroused the widest interests in foreign literature among the mass readership.Produced within a period of great revolution in Chinese literary tradition,translations and writings by a popular translator like Zhou naturally became a site of fierce conflict and contention for old and new literary traditions.However,in current literature,especially within the field of translation studies,there is still a lack of attention to Zhou's translations.The influence and contribution of his literary works to the construction of modern Chinese literature has not been fully recognized.A combination of corpus methods and classical narratology will result in a more systematic and comprehensive study on Zhou Shoujuan's translations.The findings at hand are presented as a contribution towards a further understanding of the translation activities at that time,as well as a useful complement to the paradigm of corpus-based translation studies from both research topic to mode of comparison.In the past few decades,people have gained a renewed insight into Zhou Shoujuan and other translators in the late Qing dynasty.Various researches are conducted surrounding Zhou's choices of original texts,the linguistic features of his translated texts,his translation strategies,and the interaction between his translations and original writings,etc.However,many of the recent studies rely on secondary data and focus on the macro level,lacking in a systematic description conducted from the micro level.Some important topics are not yet fully investigated.As to research methodology,interdisciplinary methods are rarely used,which leads to a deficiency in completeness and persuasiveness.In response to the problems listed above,this research first collects primary data from online library and offline resources,and then combines quantitative methods from corpus-based translation studies,corpus linguistics,and corpus stylistics,with classical narratology as the analytical framework.During the process of corpus analysis,Zhou Shoujuan's translations are compared with his own writings in order to find out their distinctive characteristics.The analysis begins with the macro linguistic features of Zhou Shoujuan's translations by examining various parameters automatically generated by corpus tools.During this process,a list of keywords that show statistically different frequency within the two corpora is retrieved.This list helps to identify words that can be related to features of the narrative structure in the corpus.Then,the dissertation goes on to examine the distribution,collocation,cluster,and context of the keywords,in order to find out the distinctive features of female characterization,plotting,point of view,focalization and speech representation in Zhou's translations.The results show that Zhou Shoujuan's translations differ from his original writings mainly in the following three aspects:Firstly,according to macro statistics produced by WordSmith Tools,Zhou's translations are lower in lexical variety,higher in the degree of formalization,but no less readable compared with his original writings.More specifically,core patterns of lexical use in his translations include lower lexical density,greater repetition of the most frequent words and a lower proportion of functional words over lexical words.As to syntactic features,due to a larger number of long sentence segments,the load capacity of sentence segments in Zhou's translations is slightly expanded.However,because that Zhou resorted to various kinds of strategies and techniques,his translations are no less readable than his creative writings.Although renowned as easy-to-understand by a wide readership,Zhou's translations differ significantly from his writings seen from a quantitative perspective.Secondly,through the analysis of third-person pronoun “yi”(?)and certain nouns and adjectives that are used with statistically significant difference within the two kinds of texts,the findings show that the stories in Zhou's translations also deviate greatly from his original writings.The depiction of female characters in the translations are much more resourceful.There is more attention on female characters in Zhou's translations than in his original writings.Female characters in the translations are more realistic,round and complicated.For the plot part,key nouns show that Zhou retained a great number of words concerning source language culture.What's more,while being obsessed with tragic love stories in original writings,Zhou pursued twisty and sophisticated plot in translations.Thirdly,the discussion of first-person pronoun “wo”(?),verba sentiendi and reporting verbs on the keyword list shows that Zhou Shoujuan's translations differ significantly from his writings in narrative structure,more specifically in the choice of narrator and focalizer,as well as speech and thought presentation.Narrators in Zhou's translations are less visible and guidance for narratees' reception are fewer.There is a stronger reliance on character-bound narrators in Zhou's translations.Conversations between characters contribute greatly to the promotion of plot.Main characters and plots are more frequently narrated through the observation of other characters,especially when a minor character functions as the focalizer.The last part of the dissertation tries to lay out the main factors that contribute to the features of Zhou Shoujuan's translations,which include the nature of translation activity,different poetic systems between the source and target language cultures,the socialcultural context of his literary activities,and Zhou's personal factors.Features like lower lexical density and a higher percentage of functional words in Zhou Shoujuan's translations can be explained by the nature of translation process,including the cognitive characteristics of the translation process and the interference from the source language.Differences between Chinese and western poetic systems fashion Zhou's translation from plotting,characterization to other features in narrative discourse.Socio-cultural context also exerts great influence on Zhou's translated texts through the purpose and publishing media of his translations.Zhou's individualities,including his disposition,knowledge of literature and professional identity,shape the narrative structure of his translations as manifested in the themes of the story,characterization and point of view.The analysis concludes that Zhou's translations differ from his original writings in both linguistic features and narrative structures.The results confirm or refute some observations in the literature by using a quantitative method and provide a fresh insight into areas which traditional qualitative researches failed to pick up on.Methodologically,the present study proposes a model for the study of features of translations by comparing one's translations with his/her own original writings.This type of comparison is rarely conducted within the paradigm of corpus-based translation studies.What's more,the present research uses corpus methods to analyze an indispensable topic in Chinese literary and translation history,which provides new observations and methodology in studying the translation history of early modern China.Hopefully,this research will facilitate studies on both Chinese translation history and corpus-based translation studies.