A Corpus-based Approach To Investigating The Translation Style Of Ezra Pound

Translation, as an old cultural communicative activity in human history, develops the understandings among different countries and cultures effectively. Thus, with the rapid growth of international communications and the growing demands for translations, more and more scholars pay their attention to summarizing the universal laws on the job of translating from previous translations. For instance, the theories of "dynamic equivalence" put forward by Nina,"three principles of translation" proposed by Tytler and "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance" initiated by Yan Fu, etc. However, all these theories, most of which are prescriptive, tend to describe translating process as a derivative rather than creative activity, highlight the importance of equivalence between the source and translated text and further ask the translators to be totally "invisible" in their translation works.But these prescriptive theories, sometimes, appear to be inadequate and inconvincible with the territory of translation studies being widened. Therefore, some translation scholars begin to put their spotlight on constructing a new theory, namely, Descriptive Translation Theory, which focuses on the translated texts and no longer considers translation as a simple process of text transfer from the source language to the target language but as a polysystem in which many variables, such as society, culture etc, interact with each other. It is the shift from prescriptive theory to descriptive theory that broadens the horizon of translation studies and, in the mean time, sets a solid theoretical foundation for corpus-based study of translator style.The present study, based on Descriptive Translation Theory and corpus techniques, attempts to investigate the translational style of Ezra Pound through a small scale corpus composed of Pound’s English translation of Shi Jing and two other comparable corpora. The findings of the study are shown at two (?). lexical level and-(?) level.At the lexical level, the thesis finds that the vocabulary variance in Pound’s translation is greater than that in Legge and Xu Yuanchong’s translations; Pound employs more content words, especially nouns. There are significant differences in the use of top ten words between Pound’s translation and other two translations and the difference is more dramatic in the use of personal pronoun subjects. Pound uses more longer words, which objectively increases the difficulty of his translation and makes it more formal in style.At the syntactical level, Pound’s translation has the least sentences but more variance than other two ones, which makes Pound’s translation closer to that of non-translated poems; Pound uses fewer complex sentences than Legge and Xu Yuanchong do. Compared with other two translations, fewer contracted forms are employed in Pound’s version.All these findings are strongly correlated with Pound’s Imagism ideas. In addition, these findings also vividly prove that Pound himself is practicing the translation principle he has advocated, i.e."Vortex" translation theory.Corpus-based empirical study to the investigation of an individual translator’s style, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, is helpful to explore the style of the target text scientifically and to analyze them comprehensively. It can provide researchers and critics of translation with a powerful tool and reliable data, thus rendering their analyses objectivity and persuasive power and avoiding the subjectivity and intuitive comments of the traditional studies.