A Stylistic Analysis Of The Translations By Modern Chinese Women Translators

In the circle of translation research, translator is always a focus for the researchers. With the rise of the feminist movement all around the world, the research on gender and translation has been attached great importance. But in China, research in this field, especially on women translators has gained little attention. The objective of this thesis is to make a stylistic analysis on the translations by modem Chinese women translators, adopting the method of quantitative analysis under the guide of register theory in order to obtain the main stylistic characteristics of modern Chinese women translators.The stylistic analysis of this thesis carries out through two steps. The first step is to describe the linguistic patterning of the samples. The second step is to explain why this patterning exists.At the first step of the stylistic analysis, the data are sampled according to stratified sampling approach. Then the norm of the stylistic analysis is established and the method is utilized and justified. According to the method mentioned, a stylistic analysis is made on the samples based on the established norm. At last the following findings are obtained.In general, women translators' translations is much more formal than men translators' and the stylistic range of women translators is much wider than that of men translators.Specifically, at the linguistic level of lexicon, women translators tend to use more bookish and ancient words, words / phrases with long pre-modifier, whole phrases / clauses used as noun phrases, fewer informal words; at the linguistic level of syntactic structure, women translators tend to use more passive structures, complex and long sentences, exclamatory sentences, and fewer ellipses; at the linguistic level of cohesion, women translators tend to use more cohesive markers and more compact logical expressions.At non-linguistic level, there are two findings: firstly, women translators tend to take compassion on female characters in the novel who are suffering a lot. They try not to destroy the image of these female characters. But the men translators do not care at all. Secondly, women translators tend to use more euphemistic expressions than men translators. Men translators are usually very direct and accurate.At the second step of the stylistic analysis, an explanation is made under the frame of register theory. According to register theory, the different stylistic characteristics between women translators and men translators are attributed to their different role relationships with the participants in social activities during the process of gender construction.