A Corpus-based Study On Translator’s Style

To Kill a Mockingbird is the masterpiece of American Southern writer Harper Lee,who has written only two novels in her lifetime.The second novel,Go Set a Watch,is set two decades later of the stories in To Kill a Mockingbird.To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by a six-year-old girl,depicting the problem of racial discrimination in the South of America during the Great Depression.The novel was published in 1960 and won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Literature,becoming an instant hit and is regarded as one of the masterpieces of modern American literature.So far,the book has been translated into over forty languages and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.Among the seven Chinese translations being published,this paper selects two versions published by Yilin Press,which are Gao Hongmei’s translation in 2012 and Li Yuchao’s translation in 2017,as the research objects.Translator’s style refers to a series of stable and personalized features that the translator embodies in the translating procedure,which distinguishes him from other translators.Since the development of the research on translator style of corpus for more than 20 years,scholars of domestic and overseas have made many progresses on this research topic,yet the definition of its connotation is still vague,and the research method and scope need to be expanded.This thesis includes five chapters.Chapter one is the introduction.This chapter introduces the background of the research,Harper Lee and the novel To Kill a Mockingbird,as well as the research objective and structure.Chapter two is the literature review,introducing the research status of corpus-based studies on translator’s style and the translation of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird.Chapter three introduces the research theory,the building of corpus,data processing,the corpus tool and the reference corpus.Chapter four is the main part of this thesis.It analyzes the translator’s style of the two translated versions of To Kill a Mockingbird from the three levels:lexical level,syntactic level and textual level.Research parameters at the lexical level include the type/token ratio,high frequency words and lexical density.On syntactic level,the average sentence length,hypotactical level,Ba-sentence and Bei-sentence,as well as the use of punctuation are investigated.On textual level,the thesis mainly analyzes the use of conjunctions and reference.This thesis finds that Gao Hongmei’s and Li Yuchao’s translations have similarities in the above three levels,and they also show significant differences.On lexical level,Gao’s version uses a smaller vocabulary,and her language is simple and formal,while Li’s version has a larger vocabulary and his use of words is flexible and full of change;On syntactic level,Gao’s version has a longer sentence length and a structure similar to the original text,while Li’s version is not limited to the form of the original text,and the writing is fluent and more readable.On textual level,Li’s version uses more conjunctions,performing better in cohesion.By conducting a comparative research on the translator’s style of two translations from three levels,this thesis finds that the two translators exhibit different translation styles in the translation process,and explains them in terms of translation strategies and methods.The research results provide some references for readers’choice of translation,and also lay a foundation for further research on the causes of translator’s style.