| The research into the translator’s style is a new and important topic. For a long time, this research has always been based on impression and intuition to judge whether a translator has his or her translating style while retaining and transferring the source text in the translation. This subjective and qualitative-oriented approach, being not persuasive enough, has its limitations.This paper firstly rediscovers the objective existence of translator’s style synchronically and diachronically. Then, by choosing three translation versions of the modern prose Bei Ying, this paper investigates the translating style of three translators’ —David Pollard, Yang Xiangyi and Zhang Peiji, aiming to discover three translators’ distinctive translating styles. Based on Douglas Biber’s Multi-dimensional Analysis, the present research qualitatively compares and quantitatively analyses the three versions by choosing four dimensions: information versus involved production, narrative versus non-narrative concerns, explicit versus situation-dependent reference, abstract versus non-abstract information. In the analysis process, Readability Test and One-Way ANOVA are also introduced, as an additional parameter to compare and test the accuracy of the obtained data.The findings reveal that, the three translators do show a consistent preference for using their own translation methods. Zhang Peiji’s translation version contains much more information and reads easily. His translation tends to be literal and his dictions are carefully edited and what he translates is in low cohesion in the context. David Pollard’s translation language tends to be oral and reads more native. His version reads liberal but difficult, and pays much attention to the cohesion of the text. Yang Xianyi and Gladys’ translation version tends to be a combination of literal and liberal translation.It’s argued that possible causes for the distinctive styles include the translators’ native language cultures and translation norms. |
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