An Investigation Of Differences In Translators’Styles In Cooperative Translation

Cooperation can help translators better cope with heavy workloads and tight time limits. However, as translation is subjective and individual, stylistic differences may arise when a text is translated by several people. Since the beginning of the21st century, studies on "translator’s style" have received increasing attention from scholars at home and abroad. Theo Hermans and Mona Baker, among other scholars, have pointed out that a translation text, while necessarily representing the source text, also reflects its translator. Meanwhile, the application of corpus technology in translation studies has (provided powerful instruments for translators’ stylistic analyses. The case study of the.thesis, through corpus technology (quantitative analyses) and human close reading (qualitative analyses), reveals the stylistic inconsistencies in the cooperative translation (E-C) of The Major and the Pickpocket. In the study, a translator’s style is defined as all the linguistic and non-linguistic features typical of a translator, shown with regularity in the translation. Two approaches are adopted to the analyses:the quantitative approach and the qualitative one, with one centring on linguistic forms and the other on content. The case study is divided into two sections:first demonstrating the stylistic coherence in the source text, then analysing the stylistic differences among the translators, at lexical, syntactic and textual cohesion levels. The thesis ends by summarizing the possible aspects in which stylistic differences may occur in cooperative translation, and making suggestions accordingly, which include simulating working conditions in the test translation, choosing translators of stylistic affinity among all qualified candidates.