Wang Chi-Chen’s Style In The Translation Of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories

The present research is a corpus-assisted study of Wang Chi-chen’s style in the translation of contemporary Chinese short stories. Translator style in this thesis is defined as the distinctive linguistic choices of the translator in his translations consistently. The distinctive linguistic choices which are thought to be the manifestations of translator style are investigated from two aspects:the overall linguistic features of the translations, and the translation strategies the translator adopted in his transfer of certain source culture-specific items. The recognition and classification of the translation strategies takes Aixela’s (Aixela,1996) as the basis.The thesis is to answer two sets of questions:a)What are the overall linguistic features in Wang’s translations? b) How does Wang transfer the culture-specific items from the Chinese texts to English?For the first question, linguistic features of the translations are the lexical features and syntactic features. The lexical features in this research are lexical variation and lexical complexity explored by the investigation of the type-token ratio (abbrev. STTR) and mean word length respectively. The syntactic feature is the syntactic complexity explored by the investigation of the average sentence length. For the second question, culture-specific items highly indicative of the Chinese culture cover fictional personal names, appellation, references to food and drink, units of currency, references to conventions and religious belief, expressions of historical events, festivals and solar terms.The study is conducted in a data-driven approach with no concrete hypotheses put forward before data collection. It makes a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Corpus-assisted methods are used in the first stage so as to investigate the stylistic patterns empirically. Qualitative methods are mainly the interpretations of the data collected and the discussions of the causes behind the translation.The empirical investigation is conducted by WordSmith Tools5.0and ParaConc demo based on the self-compiled Wang’s translational corpus WTC and the Chinese-English parallel corpus WPC and the reference corpora of the fiction sub-corpus of the TEC and the fiction sub-corpus of the Brown Corpus.The quantitative investigation with the qualitative analysis gets Wang’s style: simple diction and syntax, and adoption of conservation strategy in transferring culture-specific items with a few substitution procedures. The causes behind the style are interpreted from socio-political, ideological and poetological perspectives. With his reader-oriented translation philosophy as the premise, Wang took the socio-cultural, ideological and poetological factors into full consideration. Little interaction of both cultures, different ideologies, and the unbalanced poetological status of both literatures together determined Wang’s style in his style in translations.