The Study Of Translator's Style Based On Corpus Translation Studies

Moment in Peking,Lin Yutang's most representative work written in English,was called the modern version of Hong Lou Meng by European and American Sinologists.It became a hit in America the time it came out in 1939 and got nominated by Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.This work has occupied such an important position in literature field that it attracted wide attention among scholars both at home and abroad.Many scholars,especially those at home,have done a variety of researches on it,among which the translation researches counted most.However,scholars who were affected by traditional translation theory paid little attention to translator's style.This situation hasn't been changed until the emergence of corpus translation studies,of which translator's style research was viewed as a vital part.Moreover,few scholars have compared and analyzed the translator's style of its translated versions by employing corpus tools.Therefore the author chooses its two translated versions--Zhang Zhenyu's and Yu Fei's version--as the research object,and then builds a parallel corpus which can only be used in this research and collects the data with the help of corpus software such as AntConc3.4.3.Moreover,to make the research data more convincing,the thesis takes the data of the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese(LCMC)for reference.Based on corpus translation studies and by utilizing the qualitative and quantitative methods,this thesis aims to explore the differences between Zhang's translation style and Yu's translation style from perspectives of vocabulary(standard type/token ratio,lexical density,word frequency,hypotactic level)and sentence(average sentence length,the number of passive sentence)and tries to probe into the factors behind the differences of the two translators' styles with the aid of Chesterman's translation norms theory.The findings are as follows: On the one hand,the investigation on lexical level shows that,compared with Yu's version,Zhang's version has relatively higher standard type/token ratio,higher lexical density and lower hypotactic level.Although the high frequency words of the two versions are similar,the high frequency words inZhang's version reveal a stronger tendency of simplification.On the other hand,the investigation on syntactic level shows that Zhang's version has higher average sentence length but less passive sentence than those of Yu's version.What's more,the above data of Zhang's version is closer to those of the reference corpus LCMC.In conclusion,according to the data mentioned above,Zhang's version is more flexible and more in line with the Chinese narrative way on lexical and syntactic level.Zhang's version displays more translator's subjectivity and tends to meet Chinese readers' expectations and thus it enjoys more popularity among numerous readers.On the contrary,Yu's version is more faithful to the original on lexical and syntactic level due to his translation purpose and strategy.This study sheds light on both translators' styles and Moment in Peking and supplies readers with some suggestions in choosing the translated versions of Moment in Peking.However,the current study is far from being perfect in that the corpus built in this study still has room for improvement.In addition,this study is confined to the lexical and syntactic levels.