A Corpus-based Survey Of Howard Goldblatt’s Translator’s Style

Traditionally, translator’s style research mainly concerns about the fact whether the author’s language is reflected in translation or not. With the development of descriptive translation studies, researchers begin to pay more attention to the unique language characteristics of translators. It is worthy of being noted that with the help of corpus, quantitative analysis of long translational texts can be carried out and linguistic features and stylistic patterns can be found, which leads to the study of translator’s style more accurately and scientifically.With the aid of WordSmith6.0, Howard Goldblatt’s translator’s style exhibited in The Red Sorghum is investigated at three linguistic levels:lexical, syntactic, and textual by comparing a monolingual translation corpus of The Red Sorghum with an original English corpus and another monolingual translation corpus. The result of the study shows that Goldblatt’s translator’s style is relatively unique. At lexical level, Goldblatt tends to use relatively longer words to express specific meaning, and high type/token ratio and lexical density suggest his lexicon is rich. At syntactic level, the average sentence length is medium, but do not lack of change; low proportion of subordinators and subordinate phrases decrease the complexity of sentence, which accords with his translation principle. He emphasizes the readability and acceptability. He is opposed to two translation extremes. One is obscure, while the other is vulgar and unrefined. At textual level, conjunction is frequently used to achieve cohesion.