Exploring Xu Mengxiong’s Style In The English Translation Of Ziye-A Corpus-based Translation Study

Translation has long been considered as a derivative rather than creative activity and therefore,the studies concerning style are often related to the original text.The traditional translation theories focus on the equivalence between the source and translational texts and ask the translators to be "invisible" in their translation works.Little attention has been paid to studying the style of a translated text or a translator.However some scholars gradually discovered that some phenomena could not be explained in the case of the traditional translation studies.Hence,Descriptive Translation Studies came into being and translation has since not been viewed only as a process of text transfer from the source language to the target language but as a polysystem where a number of elements are involved such as the social,cultural and ideological background,which broadens the horizon of translation.The corpus-based approach to translator’s style is a brand new research paradigm that focus on studies of features of a translator based on large-scale data analyses.The combination of Descriptive Translation Studies and corpus set a solid theoretical foundation and the technical support for the corpus-based research of translator style.With the help of corpus,statistical analysis of translated works can be done through which linguistic features of a translator can be identified.The present thesis is a corpus-based study with the combination of qualitative analyses and quantitative analyses,aiming at exploring the translation style of Xu Mengxiong through comparing his English translation Ziye with several translated texts by native speakers of English.The statistical analyses of the two corpora are developed mainly from three aspects:the lexical,syntactical and discoursal levels so that Xu Mengxiong’s translation style can be detected from different perspectives.The findings of this thesis indicate that compared with those translators whose native language is English,Xu Mengxiong has his unique translation style in translating Ziye.Xu Mengxiong tends to make the content of the source text explicit,in addition,he focuses on the lexical variability of his translation work and the readability of the target readers.The empirical study of an individual translator style based on corpus,is helpful to investigate the style of the translation work more scientifically.It offers authors of translation a powerful tool and large-scale authentic data,thus rendering their researches objectivity and persuasive power and avoiding the subjectivity and intuitive comments of the traditional studies.