| Translation has traditionally been regarded as a derivative activity, rather than an act of creation in its own right. Traditional theorists of translation attach great importance to a translation’s faithfulness to the original, arguing that the style of the translation is heavily dependent on the style of the source text. As a result, the translation is supposed to reflect nothing more than the style of the original. However, with the advent of Descriptive Translation Studies and the development of Corpus-Based Translation Studies, scholars begin to investigate the presence of translator or the traces that the translator has left in the translated text by conducting quantitative analysis of existing and self-compiled parallel or translational corpus. Furthermore, they also bring their own interpretations to the ontological status of translator’s style in the light of recent advances in various relevant disciplines.Lin Yutang is a world-renowned writer-translator-scholar. As a prolific writer, Lin owes his repute to his compilations and translations of Chinese classic texts into English. The Gay Genius:The Life and Times of Su Tungpo is certainly one of them. Lin started the writing of this book after the Chinese people’s great victory over the Japanese invaders in World War II and completed the book in 1947. Ever since its publication in the US and Britain in 1947 and 1948 respectively, the book has had profound ramifications for the western readership. The Gay Genius reconstructed the eventful life and turbulent times of Su Dongpo, a great poet in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), and presented us with an image of Dongpo as a lovable and venerable man of letters with versatile talents.Song Biyun, a translator in Taiwan, China, published her translation of The Gay Genius in the summer of 1977. One year later, Zhang Zhenyu, a professor at Taiwan University, published his version of The Gay Genius. Despite the fact that both of the two versions appeals well to the general readership as well as an academic audience, there are few if any scholars who have accorded their attention to the differences between the two versions. Most of the previous studies on the two versions have remained at the level of impressionistic review and qualitative analysis without introducing large-scale quantitative investigation.In sharp contrast with previous studies, the thesis intends to carry out a systematic comparison between the two Chinese versions at the lexical level as well as the syntactic level. Based on a parallel corpus which include both of the two versions and the original complied by the author of the thesis, the author intends to make a comparative study on the two Chinese versions from the lexical as well as the syntactic level. The lexica-level analysis focuses on four aspects:type/token ratio, lexical density, high-frequency words and Chinese four-character idioms. The syntactic-level comparison focuses three aspects:mean sentence length, sentence pair and the Chinese "de" construction.The results obtained from qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest that: Firstly, the type/token ration is much lower overall for Zhang’s version, indicating that his range of vocabulary is more limited than Song’s. The lexical density for Song’s version and Zhang’s version is a little bit higher than that of the Biography sub-corpus in Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC-Biography). That is to say both versions are a little bit more difficult to understand than original Chinese. Besides, Zhang’s version features a higher use of pronouns and functional words, indicating his willingness to use formal cohesive devices to make his translation more formally coherent. Personal pronouns feature prominently in both Song’s and Zhang’s version, which is in sharp contrast with LCMC-Biography. Due to Zhang’s more frequent use of the archaic structural particle "之", it can be concluded that Zhang’s version is more formal in style. The occurrence of Chinese four-character idioms is higher in Zhang’s version than in Song’s version, indicating that Zhang’s version is more fluent and idiomatic. At the syntactic level, the mean sentence length of Song’s version is lower than that of Zhang’s version whereas the mean sentence segment length of the two Chinese versions is almost the same. One to one is the predominant Sentence Pair (SP) type in the two Chinese versions. There are more 2:1 SPs in Song’s version than in Zhang’s version, indicating that Song prefers to combine several sentences into one single Chinese sentence while Zhang are willing to adhere to the syntactic organization of the English original. Zhang’s use of Chinese "de" construction is more frequent than that of Song’s, thus increasing his version’s CLC rate and reducing its fluency and readability.In the final analysis, there is no significant difference between the two versions as far as the quantitative analysis is concerned. However, it is worthy of note that Zhang’s version features a longer length, a more frequent use of Chinese four-character expressions and a higher CLC rate. To some extent, it may account for the reason why Song’s version is more popular among the general readership. |
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