A Corpus-based Analysis Of Translato’rs Style In Two English Versions Of Nahan

With the development of computer technology, corpus linguistics, as a new and rising discipline, hasbeen applied in many aspects of linguistic research, especially in the field of translation studies. It hasprovided a new paradigm for the translator’s style. The traditional studies on the translator’s style aremainly carried out on the basis of individual intuition and impression, which is subjective, prescriptive andimpressionistic. Without doubt, there are some deficiencies and restrictions in this approach. For example,it has an overemphasis on the reproduction of the style of the original text or author, which results in thenegligence of “the recurring linguistic habits”, that is, the translator’s style. It is not until the emergence ofDescriptive Translation Studies that the focus has been shifted to the target texts and target culture.Together with the development of corpus linguistic, the corpus-based methodology has been applied intothe exploration of the translator’s style on the basis of large-scale data, which is more objective andconvincing. Therefore this thesis is expected to make an investigation on the distinctive styles ofoutstanding translators Yang Xianyi&Glady Yang and William A. Lyell, based on their translated versionsof Lu Xun’s famous work Nahan. In order to achieve this specific research goal, further investigation willbe carried out to identify the particular stylistic features of the two translation versions on the lexical level,syntactical level and textual level.The major findings of this thesis indicate the two translators show their particular preference in termsof some linguistic features after a comparative study of the two translations. We can find that: at lexicallevel, the Yang Xianyi’s version is featured by higher type-token ratio, longer mean word length, higherlexical density, and higher proportion of the noun phrases, while the Lyell’s version is featured by lower type-token ratio, shorter mean word length, lower lexical density, and higher proportion of theprepositional phrases. The results demonstrate that Yangs have a wider range of vocabulary and adopt morecomplicated words, in order to cover as much information as possible in the original text, which obviouslyincreases the difficulty of his version. However, Lyell tends to simplify his version to achieve thereadability and acceptability in his translation. At the syntactic level, Yangs tend to use short butcomplicated sentences in his translation while Lyell prefers to adopt long but simple sentences. At textuallevel, the Lyell’s version ranks a higher proportion than Yangs’ in the use of adverbial connectors andreference, to make the relationship between words or sentences explicit, while the connection between thesentences or paragraphs in Yangs’ version mainly depends on the inner logic and semantic connections,which leads to less use of the adverbial connectors and the comparatively covert referential relationship.After a further exploration of the possible reasons for the divergence of the two translators’ stylesfrom the aspect of the translators’ native cultures and translation norms, we find that the culturaldifferences and translation norms are the main factors which contribute to the shaping of translator’s styleduring the process of translation.This thesis suggests that the corpus-based methodology, as a combination of qualitative and quantitiveapproaches, offers an effective way for the investigation on the translator’s style, which sets a newparadigm in the field of translation.