| The Importance of Living is Lin Yutang’s first book after his moving to the United States. When it was first published in the US by John Day Book in 1937, it quickly provoked a stir in both American society and readers and swiftly appeared to the US bestseller list and topped that list for continuous 52 weeks. The book has been translated into more than ten languages and still enjoyed the world’s best-known reputation all around the world. Mr. Lin admits that one of the most important purposes of writing this book is to share and show Chinese old wisdom in life philosophy based upon the observation of Chinese saints and sages of the ancient past and open a window for more and more Western people to get a chance to know about Chinese culture. The Importance of Living has been studied by numerous domestic and overseas scholars from different aspects, such as the strategy for cross-cultural communication, the narrative strategy in the cross-cultural background and context. However, it still lacks the empirical studies on comparative analysis, especially the researches on the translator’s style.The corpus-based research can improve the traditional research method of lacking relevant necessary objective data, hence having a great value in translation studies.This paper attempts to investigate the stylistic features of the two Chinese versions of The Importance of Living from the lexical, sentence and textual levels with the aids of WordSmith 6.0, BFSUPowerConc1.0 and AntConc 3.4.3. Through the contrastive study of the statistics, the author finds that:At the lexical level, Yue Yi’s version is characterized by high standard type/token ratio and high lexical density. Thus Yue Yi’s version demonstrates a tendency of employing more varied and diversified words. It is also found that Yue Yi’s version shows a tendency of using more verbs to keep the narrative style of the original text, while Huang Chia-Teh tends to use more nouns.At the syntactical level, the investigation of result reveals that Huang Chia-Teh has an apparent tendency of interpreting the text by adopting longer sentences, therefore, his average sentence length is evidently higher than that of Yue Yi’s version. At the same time, Huang’s version uses more modal particles such as emotional words and interjections, which is more similar to the Chinese expressions habits.At the textual level, Huang Chia-Teh’s version features in using more nominal substitutions rather than conjunctions as cohesive devices for the purpose of text coherence.Investigation in the three levels, namely, word level, sentence level and textual level, demonstrates that the two Chinese translators obviously manifest different styles in their process of translation. The research findings surely not only provide some suggestions for the readers’options in selecting the Chinese translation versions of The Importance of Living, but also make a valuable exploration for applying corpus tools to study the translated literary works to some extent. |
