Corpus-based Research On Transltor’s Style Of Chang Hen Ge

The translator’s style generally refers to individual characteristics thattranslators perform in the process of the translation, which, in detail, can be statedas typical language habits of translators, mainly involving the selection oftranslation strategies, personal preferences of the expressions as well as linguisticphenomena that frequently occur in translations.Translation activities have been considered as imitation behaviors rather thancreative activities for quite a long time. Conventionally, translators are destined toreproduce the original style of source language texts. Hence researches on thetranslator’s style have been landed in a disadvantaged position. Afterwards, withthe upsurge of Corpus Linguistics, corpus has been broadly applied in studies ofthe translator’s style. However, corpus-based researches on translational stylisticstudies are still at an initial stage, which mainly blossoms in theoreticalexplorations but are deficient in mining researches.Out of this deficiency, this thesis adopts Chang Hen Ge, a renowned poemfrom Bai Juyi, and its translations as the research blueprint and constructs a C-Ebilingual parallel corpus and a monolingual comparable corpus for studies. Itemploys the corpus-based translational stylistics as the theoretical framework,utilizes quantitative approaches with qualitative methods, and synthesizesmonolingual comparable modes and bilingual parallel modes, which aims to carryout a descriptive exploration towards different styles of translators with thecomputational assistance and tries to discover possible reasons accounting fordistinctive styles.The thesis is elaborated from the following four aspects: Firstly, the thesismakes a systematic review on current studies of Chang Hen Ge’s translations and defines the translator’s style and points out that previous studies are mostlyfeatured with qualitative methods, unitary paradigm and insufficient mininganalyses so as to clarify the theoretical and practical significances of the presentresearch. Second, according to corpus-based approaches, the thesis conducts a C-Ebilingual corpus comprised by Chang Hen Ge and its four translations andestablishes a British Poetic Corpus for the monolingual comparable corpus. Apartfrom that, under the theoretical foundation of the corpus-based translationalstylistics, the thesis applies WordSmith Tools and linguistic parameters intoexplorations on the translator’s style from lexical, syntactic and textual levels.Finally, the thesis tries to examine possible reasons accounting for different stylesof translators.According to data analysis, findings are obtained as follows: Xu Yuanchong’sstyle is prominent in the metrical translation and is close to the source languageculture, with the liberal translation largely adopted and transliterations assupplements. Fletcher’s style considers the acceptance of target readers and isoriented by the target language. Besides, his style is featured with end rhymes,with the literal translation mainly employed and transliterations andgeneralizations as supplements. Glies’s prose delivers more information and isaffected by the source language. In addition, he mainly utilizes literal translationswith free translations and transliterations slightly adopted. For Yang Hsien-yi andGladys Yang, they remain neutral in the process of the translation and their style isalso featured with the word-by-word translation. What’s more, styles of translatorsare closely related to the translation environment, cultural backgrounds andtranslation orientations. The thesis initiates a new research model towards the study on rhythms ofpoetry, applying rhythm schemes of English poetry into studies of the translator’sstyle, which strives to broaden the framework of corpus-based translationalstylistics.