| Eileen Chang(1920-1995),well versed in both Chinese and English,won herself an international fame as a prominent bilingual writer and translator in the 20th century China.The majority of extant studies analyze one or a few of her self-translated works,such as The Golden Cangue(?????),and the Rouge of North(????)in the light of theories ranging from colonialism,feminism to Lefevere's rewriting theory and translator's subjectivity in a bid to summarize their features,and/or find the motivations lurking behind Chang's translational strategies.Yet few have conducted a systemic investigation into Chang's English self-translations by a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.This study aims to examine the style of Chang's English self-translations by building a relatively comprehensive parallel corpus of her Chinese works and corresponding self-translations in English,as well as a comparable corpus that consists of her self-translations and her English writings.The fiction sub-corpus of Brown corpus(hereafter Brown FIC)is used as a reference corpus.The style is investigated from three levels:the lexical level,syntactic level,as well as textual level,via corpus statistics and supplementary examples.Moreover,the author takes a further step to investigate paratexts surrounding the texts under study,which in this case mainly consist of titles,reviews and reader's comments.At lexical level,STTR of the Chinese versions is higher than that of the English versions,indicating that Chang uses a larger vocabulary when writing in Chinese.However,there is no conspicuous discrepancy between her self-translations and English writings in terms of STTR.Besides,the STTR and lexical density scores of STC and EW are higher than those of Brown FIC.It can be inferred,therefore,that Chang's self-translations have higher information load in comparison with native English originals,which do not comply with the hypothesis of simplification in CTS.As for lexical idiosyncrasy,it is found that Chang's novels are often against the backdrop of 1940s' Shanghai where the struggles between modern and tradition and conflicts between East and West culminate.At syntactical level,the MSL of STC and EW is lower than that of CC and Brown FIC.This indicates that Chang splits the original Chinese run-on sentences into separate English ones,so as to conform to English syntactic construction.At textual level,three parameters including cohesive devices,personal pronouns and readability scores are examined.As for title translation,Chang has freedom in choosing whether to reconstruct or literally re-present the original titles as she herself as a self-translator owns the copyright of her works.Both the Chinese and western academic circles extol Chang as "a giant in Chinese literature".A supplementary keyword analysis of readers' comments demonstrates that Chang's English self-translations have fairly good reception in the western readership.Nonetheless,a few readers admit that they are confused and lost during their reading,as the complex appellation system and the lack of Chinese cultural and literary knowledge hinder their understanding of the stories and the embedded cultural elements as well as Chang's philosophy of life and love.Due to the limit of space and time,this research has some weakness.The comparison between Chang's self-translations and translations by other translators are lacking in this study,as there is no other English version of the same original text.Other aspects such as the models of discourse presentation,the translation of culture-loaded items,semantic prosody,and dialect can be added in the further research. |
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