A Corpus-based Study Of The Translator's Style In George Kao's Translation

Since 1990 s,corpus-based translation studies has grown swiftly and has been applied widely as a brand new research paradigm in translation studies,in which translator's style is one of the most predominant research topics.As a corpus-based translation study,this thesis investigates the translator's style in George Kao's translation and the factors shaping his style in the target cultural,social and historical context,by means of building a small-scale comparable translational corpus of Geroge Kao's and another Chinese translations of Look Homeward,Angel,through analysis and discussion in comparison with CCTFC(Contemporary Chinese Translated Fiction Corpus)and LCMC(N)(the Novels sub-Corpus of Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese).The comparative analysis finds that,at the lexical level,George Kao's translation has a more diversified use of vocabularies with a higher Standardized type/token ratio.The average word length in George Kao's translation is longer,owning to a particular preference of George Kao to use a larger proportion of four-character Chinese items.With a high lexical density,George Kao's translation carries a large amount of information.In addition,the high frequency words list reveals a explicitation tendency to use more high frequency words in his translation.The investigation at syntactic level shows that,George Kao is more faithful to the source text in form,for his average sentence length is evidently higher than the other translation,however,the average sentence segment length has been maintained in a slightly small discrepancy with the other translation.Besides,the proportion of conjunctions in George Kao's translation is similar to the non-translated Chinese novels and a preference of using more diverse adversative conjunctions in George Kao's translation is displayed by the analysis of statistics.Based on the comparison and analysis at textual level,it shows the hypotactic level in George Kao's translation is much more close to the feature of the non-translatedChinese novels compared with the general feature of the translated Chinese novels.Besides,George Kao added no footnotes on any page but adopted intratextual gloss in the text body,preserved more para-texts from the source text and also presented elaborated preface and afterwords in his translation,in order to improve the acceptability of the translated text.A conclusion can be drawn from the discussion above,George Kao's style in his translation is closer to the non-translational Chinese,and he endeavored to not only improve the acceptability of the translated text,but also enhance the adequacy to express the message and to maintain the form of the source text.Analyzing the reason making his style,it finds that George Kao chose to translate this novel in American literature because of his working experience in Ameirica.Moreover,George Kao's translation is consistent with the main stream poetics in Hong Kong and Tai Wan at that period of time which regarded the translation should be fluent and close to the non-translated text,and put the source text into the first consideration as well.Additionally,after the reform and opening-up policy,readers in China mainland were eager to come into contact with the foreign culture through translated literature works,so that the publishing houses also made some adjustments during the whole preparation and marketing process to elevate the acceptability of the translated text in order to satisfy readers' needs.