A Corpus-based Study On Translator’s Style

Translation has a long history, but Translation Studies (TS) as an established academic discipline emerged only a couple of decades ago. With the progress of the discipline, however, some problems still exist among which the divergence between qualitative and qualitative studies, the distance between translation theory and practice as well as the objective assessment of translation quality are the most controversial ones. They should be studied I more profound ways. In the thesis, the corpus-based approach is adopted so as to shed some insightful light on these problems.Short as its history is, Corpus Translation Studies (CTS) has achieved great progress in recent years with the development of modern technology. CTS is totally different from the traditional Translation Studies (TS), as it has broadened the research scope of TS.Based on three latest Chinese translations of Walden respectively translated by Pan Qingling in 2013, Li Jihong in 2013 and Yao Shujun in the press respectively, the thesis uses corpus retrieval tools Wordsmith 6.0 and Paraconc to analyze the three translations from lexical and syntax levels, that is, type/token ratio, word length, four-character expressions, lexical density, different translations of certain words, sentence length, in order to find out the three translators’ unique styles.Adopting the corpus-based approach, the thesis takes three different translators’ translated versions as the research object and analyzes them both quantitatively and qualitatively.The conclusion is drawn as follows:on the lexical level:type/token ratio of Pan’s translation is the highest among the three Chinese translations; the word length of Pan’s translation is also the longest one, but the numbers of 5-character words or more character words in three Chinese translations are similar; as to the applications of four-character idioms in the three translations, Pan uses more four-character idioms than Li and Yao which makes his translated text more fluent and readable while Li uses the least four-character idioms; Yao prefers to express the humane characteristics of the animals more willingly than Pan and Li while Pan ignores the need to express the humane characteristics but complies to the conventional expressions. When dealing with the translation of culture-loaded parts as poems, Yao prefers to maintain the beauty in sound and shape of the original texts while in Pan’s translation and Li’s translations, they pay more attention to converting the beauty in meaning while ignoring the beauty in sound and shape. Since there are many Latin words quoted by Thoreau, the three translators deal with the procedure of translation in different ways. Li prefers to use annotations, Pan prefers to write the explanation in brackets while Yao seems to ignore explaining them completely. On the syntactic level:in terms of the average sentence length, Li’s is the shortest and Pan’s is the longest. In the aspect of sentence structure, in Yao’s translation, the structure is more flexible, thus being able to better express the aesthetic meaning of the original text. While in Pan’s and Li’s translations, they prefer using longer and more complex sentences to render the original text. Pan Qingling is an experienced translator as well as a researcher in the field of American literature, whose work is more formal in shape and more elegant in the contents. Li’s translation is similar to Pan’s translation but he is less proficient than Pan.The research enriches the study of translator’s style and offers some guidance for future theoretical studies and translation practice.