A Corpus-based Study On Translator’s Style In The English Versions Of Lu Xun’s Fiction

With the development of corpus linguistics, corpus-based methods have been gradually applied in studies on translator’s style, which provides a more objective angle for this kind of study. Thus the author adopts the research method of self-established corpus so as to attempt to make comparative analysis on three English versions of Lu Xun’s 16 works of fiction. Translator’s style and translation strategy adopted are discussed at lexical, syntactic and textual level. Moreover, possible reasons which may lead to distinctive translator’s style have also been analyzed. At the lexical level, statistical analysis was made on Standardized Type/Token Ratio, word length, word frequency and lexical density. At the syntactic level, average sentence length, usage of connections and grammatical explicitation are observed. At the textual level, cohesive devices and readability of each version are discussed.The results demonstrate that each version has distinctive style. For Julia’s version, the feature of explicitation is most obvious. She adopted abundant vocabulary and complicated sentence structures, which makes her version formal and thus the level of reading difficulty is high. Lyell’s version has most words and is long and complicated. Vocabulary and sentence structure are simpler than Julia’s version. The reading difficulty is relatively low. In comparison, the feature of simplification is distinctive in Yang Xianyi’s version, which is in accord with the paratactic feature of source language.