A Corpus-based Study On The Translation Style In Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Of Luotuo Xiangzi

Luotuo Xiangzi by Lao She is a classic work in modern Chinese vernacular literature, which is full of local culture and written in unpretentious, natural and catchy language. It has been translated into more than10languages, which promotes the exchange of Chinese and foreign cultures. Among the English versions of Luotuo Xiangzi, researchers are most concerned about Rickshaw Boy translated by American translator Evan King in1945and Camel Xiangzi translated by Chinese translator Lynette Shi in1981. While Howard Goldblatt’s version is the latest English translation published in2010, and has rarely been studied in China. Howard Goldblatt is the most active and accomplished translator translating Chinese modern and contemporary literary works into English. His translation style is rigorous, picky and compliance with the principle of centering on the original work."He let contemporary Chinese literature be covered with the color of British and American Literature", evaluated by translator Gladys Yang.However, it should be noted that the research on Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Luotuo Xiangzi by Chinese scholars is not as intensive as that on Evan King and Lynette Shi’s versions. The existent researches are mostly confined to some chosen sentences, passages or texts; however, the integrated and objective study is extremely insufficient. In addition, the corpus research on the translation style of the whole Howard Goldblatt’s version is yet to be done. Therefore, the systemic assessment and valuation of Howard Goldblatt’s translation, and the thorough research of the style of this version are still insufficient. Compared with the intense research on Evan King’s and Lynette Shi’s versions, there is a research gap for Howard Goldblatt’s translation in quality as well as quantity.On this account, in this study Howard Goldblatt’s version of Luotuo Xiangzi is taken as the research object and compared with Evan King and Lynette Shi’s versions. With the application of the corpus tools "AntConc" and "CUC_Paraconc" as well as WordSmith tools, through the integrated adoption of the quantitative study and the qualitative research, a comprehensive and thorough study is implemented to assess the translation style of this version. By using the corpus tools, Howard Goldblatt’s translation is studied and analyzed quantitatively at the lexical, syntactic, textual as well as rhetorical levels. On the basis of the outcome from the quantitative analysis and study as well as the concepts and theories of both literary stylistics and corpus stylistics, the in-depth qualitative study was implemented. It is observed that, at lexical level, compared to Evan King’s and Lynette Shi’s versions, Howard Goldblatt’s version is lexically diversified and rich in the use of words with the largest word length. At syntactic level, Howard Goldblatt’s version preferred the shorter and simpler sentence patterns instead of longer ones, which is more of a concise style in accordance with the original text. Besides, a great number of complex sentences with non-finite clauses are used in Howard Goldblatt’s version to fill the information gap in the source text to improve the readability of the version. As far as the exclamatory and interrogative sentences are concerned, the original interrogative tone is well preserved in Howard Goldblatt’s translation, while many sentences with exclamatory tone are changed into declarative sentences in his translation to make it more consistent with the means of expression in English language. At textual level, on one hand, as for reference and conjunction, the third personal reference such as "he","she" and "it" are adopted widely in Howard Goldblatt’s version to make it more objective in style. On the other hand, compared to Evan King’s and Lynette Shi’s versions, the numbers of nominal substitution "one" and "ones" and clausal substitution "so" and "not" in Howard Goldblatt’s version are the smallest among the three versions. At rhetorical level, to demonstrate the well structured and vivid humorous style of the original, the form, meaning as well as the sentence structure and sentence patterns of the original analogy are kept as much as possible in Howard Goldblatt’s version. In addition, Howard Goldblatt showed great flexibility and variety in handling complicated Chinese sentences, especially in handling the chunk of parallelism.The research outcomes of the present thesis can not only act as a reference for both the professionals of translation studies and the average readers for a comprehensive understanding of Howard Goldblatt’s version of Luotuo Xiangzi, but also a kind of trying and exploring for combining translation criticism activity with corpus research. It is hoped that this analytical means as well as the framework adopted in this research can be of some favor to other similar studies, which might further advance the perfection and development of translation criticism activities.