A Corpus-Based Study On Translator’s Style In Two English Versions Of Sanguo Yanyi

As one of the important branches of descriptive studies,the study of translator’s style has obtained wide attention since its initiation at the beginning of the 21 st Century and has become a hotspot in recent years.The advent and boom of corpus linguistics break the deadlock that restrained the development of traditional study on translator’s style.It not only provides a more objective and accurate research method,research tools,research parameters,and possible conclusions but also makes it possible that a bulk of translated texts can be analyzed in the age of big data.Sanguo Yanyi,renowned as one of China’s four greatest classic novels,was written by novelist Luo Guanzhong in the turning of Yuan and Ming dynasty.At present,there’re three English translated versions of Sanguo Yanyi,which are respectively translated by C.H.Brewitt Taylor,Moss Roberts and Yu Sumei.Up to now,few scholars have compared translator’s style based on translated versions of Sanguo Yanyi.Under this background,the thesis chooses Moss Roberts’ version and Yu Sumei’s version of Sanguo Yanyi as the research object and establishes a comparative corpus to compare the differences between Moss Roberts’ translator’s style and Yu Sumei’s translator’s style.The thesis includes five chapters.Chapter One introduces the research background,research significance and the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two is literature review which concludes the previous study on translator’s style both at home and abroad,the previous study on translator’s style based on corpora and previous study on translations of Sanguo Yanyi.Chapter Three is about research design including the introduction of research objectives,research questions and theoretical framework.Chapter Four analyzes Moss Roberts’ version and Yu Sumei’s version of Sanguo Yanyi at the lexical,syntactic,and textual levels with the help of corpus tools.Based on these results from data analyses,contributing factors to the formulation of Moss Roberts’ translator’s style and Yu Sumei’s translator’s style are analyzed from the aspects of cultural backgrounds,translation purposes,and translation strategies.Chapter Five summarizes the whole thesis and puts forward the limitations and suggestions for the future.It turns out that the translator’s style of Moss Roberts is different from that of Yu Sumei.At the lexical level,the STTR is higher and the lexical density is larger in Moss Roberts’ version.It indicates that Moss Roberts is prone to more various words in his version and that more information from the original text is covered in Moss Roberts’ version;compared with Moss Roberts’ version,Yu Sumei’ version enjoys a higher proportion of “the”,“of” and “and” meaning that Yu Sumei’s version is more formal and she attaches importance to the cohesion of the context;the average word length in Moss Roberts’ version and Yu Sumei’s version are approximate.Also,there are words with many letters in both versions,indicating that Moss Roberts and Yu Sumei are adept at the use of long words;At the syntactic level,the average sentence length is longer and the average sentence length std.dev.is higher in Moss Roberts’ version,showing that Moss Roberts is prone to adopt flexible sentence structures.In terms of subordinating conjunctions,Yu Sumei uses more than Moss Roberts does.It reconfirms that Yu Sumei takes cohesion seriously.At the textual level,personal references are investigated and it is found that there is a higher proportion of personal references in Yu Sumei’s version,which once again verifies that cohesion is important to Yu Sumei;and the reading ease score of Yu Sumei’s version is higher than that of Moss Roberts’ version.That is to say,Moss Roberts’ version is more readable.