Unique Words Based Research On Translator's Style In The Translation Of Hong Lou Meng

Translator's style refers to the unique translation preference that pertains to a translator. It embodies a translator's unique use of language, characteristic application of translation criteria, and individual profile of linguistic habits during translating. This thesis conducts a corpus-based study of translator's styles in the two full English versions of Hong Lou Meng based on analysis of unique words. By constructing research corpora, the two translators'distinctive styles are investigated based on abundant language materials and authentic data."Unique word"refers to a word which appears in a text with certain frequency, while its frequency is zero in other similar texts. Translator's unique words reflect a translator's distinctive choice of words, which is different from other translators in the translation of the same text. By studying unique words, their collocations and contexts can be investigated, and consequently the translators'distinctive styles can be deeply examined.The research is conducted in the following four aspects.1) Corpora construction. The corpora of this research come from three electronic texts of Hong Lou Meng, namely, the Chinese version and the Yang couple's translated version as well as Hawkes'translated version. Corpus linguistics tools Concordance 3.0 and Concapp 4.0 are applied for data collection.2) Unique words elicitation. Concordance 3.0 is applied to elicit unique words. Among the large amount of unique words obtained, only those with frequency higher than 10 are needed for analysis and names of characters and places are ruled out. In this way 104 unique words were found in Hawkes'version, and 22 in the Yangs'version.3) Collocations, contexts, and sentences elicitation. The lists of unique words are firstly classified into unique nouns, unique verbs, unique adjectives and unique adverbs. The representative words in each category are selected for detailed analysis. Concapp 4.0 is applied to search their collocations, contexts and sentences.4) Data analysis and discussion. Different from the previous researches which argue whether translators should reflect their own styles in translation, this research acknowledges the presence of translator's style and clearly demonstrates the two translators'styles.After data analysis and discussion, the research demonstrates that the two translators do leave individual signatures. Hawkes'version has a much wider range of word choice. The language style of Hawkes is more formal than the Yang's. The Yangs'version is concise and loyal, while Hawkes'is detailed and explanatory. Hawkes'sentence length is much longer. The Yangs are more sensitive to words with rich Chinese cultural elements. Hawkes shows a clearer presence in the translation. The Yangs'version belongs to literal translation category and source language-oriented, whereas Hawkes'falls into liberal translation category and target language-oriented.This research conforms to the trend of applying corpus-based method to translation studies, and conducts unique words based research on translator's style by employing Corpus Linguistics tools. The authentic data and objective analysis are convincing, and the research is of great prospects in translator's style analysis.