Translations Of Zhuangzi:A Corpus-Based Study Of Translator's Style

The rise of descriptive translation,translators' status and development of corpus linguistics make it possible for academic circles to research on translator's style in an objective and quantitative way.The paper takes James Legge,Burton Waston and Wang Rongpei three translators'version of Zhuangzi as example,exploring their styles at lexical,syntactic and textual level through qualitative and quantitative analysis with the aid of Antconc.The results shows that Legge tends to translate scholarly and explicitly.At lexical level,his version is the one with the most tokens,using a blend of translation on terms and varied translations on reporting verbs.At syntactic level,average sentence length is the longest.It has the highest proportion of subordinators,denoting the strongest complexity of sentence.At textual level,he is especially adept at applying reference and substitution to achieve discourse coherence.Burton Waston's target readers are the general public of America,adopting reader-centered strategy.At lexical level,his version has a relatively short average word length,which is corresponding to a comparatively informal style.High lexical density suggests extensive amount of unit information and smooth expression.Also,it is consistent and cohesive in the translation of technical terms.At syntactic level,the average sentence length is moderate and complexity of sentence is low with the lowest proportion of subordinators.At textual level,Waston is good at using cohesive devices,the conjunction of which presents colloquial style.Wang Rongpei 's translation is inclined to formal style,featuring a relatively strong literary color and the influence from the original text.At lexical level,the average word length is the longest,which indicates more formal and literary words.And it also shows the tendency of redundancy,which is probably subject to the Chinese mindset.At syntactic level,it has the shortest average sentence length,which is in part the result of the sentence pattern in the original text.The complexity of sentence is only a litter lower than that of James Legge.At textual level,the proportion of reference,conjunction and substitution is much lower than those of James Legge and Burton Waston,suggesting a fewer use of cohesive devices due to a negative transference of mother tongue.Complex and diverse factors contribute to forming of translator's style.The paper is to interpret the motivations from the difference between the original and the target language,translator's personal factors and target culture and target readers.