A Corpus-based Study On Two Chinese Versions Of To The Lighthouse From The Perspective Of Feminist Translation Theory

The western feminist translation theory has attracted many scholars’ attention with the appearance of “cultural turn” in translation studies.It can be regarded as a political tool by western feminist translation theorists and used for the construction of female subjectivity with translation.For the same work,male translators and female translators have different translation styles,and the gender consciousness reflected in their different processing methods is worth studying.Most of the studies on feminist translation theory are qualitative analysis which lacks the support of objective data.There are few researchers applied corpus to this filed,therefore,researches of feminist translation theory combining quantitative and qualitative analysis are of great significance.To the Lighthouse is a representative work of the famous feminist novelist Virginia Woolf.This book applies the writing techniques of the stream-of-consciousness and imagism to describe the simple life of the Ramsay’s family.Woolf depicts the different features of characters to show her unremitting pursuit of harmony in sense and sensibility,male and female.This thesis makes the male translator Qu Shijing and female translator Wang Jiaxiang’s translation versions of To the Lighthouse as research objects,and builds a parallel corpus.The author combines quantitative and qualitative methods for this comparative study aiming to explore the manifestation of translator’s subjectivity and translation strategy from the perspective of feminist translation theory.Based on the self-made parallel corpus,this thesis probes into how the translator embodies subjectivity and translation strategies adopted by translators.The research results are showed as follows: 1)By comparing the statistics of standardized type/token ratio,lexical density,mean sentence length,the frequency of four or more words and gender word’s translation in Qu’s version and Wang’s version,this thesis finds out that the female translator Wang’s version has lower standardized type/token ratio and mean sentence length,higher lexical density and frequency of phrases.Wang’s version can reflect more respect to women in the translation of gender word.Although the differences are not significant,it still indicates that the translation of the female translator Wang Jiaxiang is more formal and elegant,which can reflect the translator’ssubjectivity under the principle of faithfulness.2)Based on the feminist translation strategies supplement,prefacing and footnoting,hijacking raised by the feminist translation theorists Luise von Flotow,this thesis makes a comparative study on Qu’s version and Wang’s version.It can be found that Wang tends to employ supplementing,prefacing and hijacking strategies for revealing female consciousness.She reflects the subjectivity by rewriting the original text.Feminist translation theory not only brings a new perspective to translation studies in theory,but also has profound influence on practice.This corpus-based empirical study from the perspective of feminist translation theory,combining quantitative and qualitative methods,makes it possible to produce an objective analysis of the female translators’ subjectivity and the choice of translation strategies,and provides a new way for exploring feminist translation theory.