A Study Of The Translator’s Style Of Pygmalion With The Corpus Approach

People are paying more and more attention to the role of the translator as the subject in translation withthe development of translation theories. Researches on translator’s style also attract great attention since then.Descriptive translation studies provide a new way for study of translator’s style for a time. Emerged in the1980s, Corpus-based translation studies make possible a systematic and full-scale description of translator’sstyle. This new study can avoid subjective judgment effectively. This new study not only provides acompletely new method for linguistic research, but also broadens the horizon of translation studies.With the aid of corpora-based studies, statistical analysis of translational texts (texts that are can betranslated) can be carried out by researchers through which translator’s linguistic features and stylisticfeatures can be identified. Researches of translator’s style mainly involved three dimensions, micro, middleand macro dimensions. Pygmalion, as a master work of Bernard Shaw, owns a lot of language apparentcharacteristics and stylistic features and attracts many scholars attention. In terms of study on Pygmalion,many scholars adopted just one version as a start point to investigate its language features. There is hardly acontrastive research of the two versions. A corpus-based study is carried out in this thesis to examinestylistic features of the two translators of Pygmalion at those levels from the micro dimension: lexical level,syntactic level and textual level. The findings are carried out as follows:At the lexical level we find: Lin’s version is lexically more varied and diversified and his translation styleowns a more conversational manner while Yang’s version is more concise lexically and easy to be understood.At syntactical level, it is found that Yang’s version is simpler in structure and more concise than that ofthe other version. The research on sentence indicates that Yang not only tries to keep the narrative structureof the original text, but also attempts to achieve very smooth flow of the information in his expressions, andthis adds readability in his translated version.As far as the textual features are concerned, compared with Lin’s version, it is uncovered that Yang’sversion is more smooth and coherent in information.Through the contrastive study of the two versions from the three levels, we can get a conclusion thatthe two translators surely showed different styles in their translation. This result of the study not onlyprovides suggestions for the future reader of Pygmalion, but also lays a foundation for the further study ofthe reasons for it.