A Study Of Lin Yutang’s Translator Style Based On A Proposed New Model

As a translator and writer,Lin Yutang’s literary and translation works are popular among foreign readers,which helps to promote the spread of Chinese culture.With the development of corpus-based translation studies,the corpus method,as an objective and scientific tool of analysis,has been widely used in the study of translator style.However,many a problem arises in this field.As a response,this thesis proposes a new model to investigate translator style according to the problems therein and the latest researches made by Huang(2015),Baker(2000)and Olohan(2004).The new model analyzes the translator style from two perspectives: macro level and micro level.At the macro level,the method of qualitative analysis is adopted to make a comparative analysis between the translator’s translation works and the original works from the perspectives of text selection and para-texts application.At the micro level,the corpus-based quantitative research method is used to compare the translator’s translation works with his original works from the lexical,syntactic,and textual perspectives.Based on the proposed model,this thesis proceeds to adopt a qualitative analysis method to analyze Lin Yutang’s translation works and original works from the perspectives of text selection and para-texts application to summarize his translator style and the reasons for it.Meanwhile,this thesis makes a quantitative analysis of Lin’s translator style by using self-built corpora and Wordsmith,Ant Conc and other corpus analysis tools.It concludes the characteristics of his translator style from lexical,syntactic and textual aspects at the micro level,and further analyzes the reasons for the formation of such a style.The result of qualitative analysis shows that Lin’s translation tends to choose the texts that can spread Chinese culture or are close to his personal interest.Lin also tends to explain his translations in the preface,adding a lot of footnotes to explain unfamiliar cultural words.According to the result of quantitative analysis,(1)both Lin’s Translation Work Corpus(TWC)and Original Writing Corpus(OWC)are slightly higher than that of British National Corpus(BNC)but relatively lower than that of Translational English Corpus(TEC),which indicates that vocabularies used inLin’s translations and writings are much more variable than that of original English texts.(2)Lin’s translated texts use less variety of words than non-translated texts.The high word frequency of Lin’s translations and writings are in accordance with the original English texts.(3)The mean word length in Lin’s translations is lower than that of BNC and TEC,showing that the difficult level of vocabularies applied in Lin’s translations is lower than the original English text.In other words,Lin’s translations are easy to understand by English readers.(4)The average value of mean word length of his original writings is higher than those in TEC and TWC,but lower than that in BNC.And Lin’s writings used longer words than translations,but the gap is narrow.The mean sentence length of Lin’s translations and writings are both higher than those of TEC and Brown Literature Corpus,manifesting that the sentences used in Lin’s works tend to be longer than that in the original English.And the mean sentence length of his translations is lower than his writings,which means that he likes to use long sentences in his writings.It can be seen that Lin Yutang’s translation works prefer to use more subordinators than his original works.The sentence of Lin’s translations is more complex than his writings,though it is shorter.(5)Both Lin’s TWC and OWC are moderately difficult to read,even for people between the ages of12 and 14.Though a little bit more complex than his original works,Lin’s translations are styled by their plainness and easy readability for their low lexical density,word and sentence length,and a proper high word frequency compared with original English texts.Lin’s educational background,national identity,translation ideas and living environment all contribute to the formation of his translation style.