A Corpus-based Translation Study On The Narrative Style Of The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is one of the masterpieces written by Amy Tan,which has won lots of praises and has been made into movies.The novel describes the life experiences of four women who emigrated from China to the United States and the contradiction between mothers and their American-born daughters.The cultural differences between China and the West become the primary reason for the estrangement between mothers and daughters.The unique narrative style is the highlight of the novel and the story becomes eloquent with the first person narrative point of view.Since its translation appeared in China,The Joy Luck Club has become widely popular among Chinese readers and has attracted the attention of many scholars.Some studies explore the theme and writing features of this novel,and some investigations are conducted on the narrative feature as well,while few studies focus on the translation from the narrative perspective,so there leaves much space for further study.This study ponders on the narrative characteristics of the novel,and conducts a comparative study of the translations of The Joy Luck Club,which aims to analyze the similarities and differences of the narrative style in translations and reveals how the four levels of narrative point of view are reflected in the translations.The narrative point of view reflects the living habits and cultural custom: the four Chinese-American mothers adhere to the traditional Chinese culture,and they get used to dealing with problems in the traditional way of thinking;while the four American daughters are deeply influenced by the American mainstream culture and have little knowledge of the Chinese culture.The unique first person narrative point of view reflects their different understandings of culture between mothers and daughters,so the investigation of the narrative point of view in the novel and its translations is helpful for exploring the cultural differences in the translations of Chinese American literature and probing into what translators should do to convey the original writing intentions and creative style.This study constructs a small corpus which takes Cheng Naishan’s version and Li Jun’s version of The Joy Luck Club as the research objects.With the assistance of corpus tools Word Smith and Ant Conc,it applies the methods of quantitative research and qualitative analysis to examine the global narrative language data: the standardized type/token ratio,lexical density,high frequency words and the mean sentence length of the two translations.Then under the theory framework of Munday’s model of narrative point of view and combined with the linguistic features of the source text,the study investigates four linguistic markers from the four planes of narrative point of view respectively,which contains transitivity,modality,deixis and the non-standard linguistic forms.It aims to make a comparative analysis of the translations of narrative point of view between the two versions,which provides a new perspective for understanding the narrative style of the text.The study draws the following conclusions:Firstly,this study finds that the two versions have slight differences in the macro-language features: Li Jun’s version has a slightly higher standard type/token ratio,lexical density and mean sentence than that of Cheng Naishan’s translation,and the frequencies of their high frequency words are marginally different.The chi-square test shows that the data has no significant difference,which indicates there is slight difference in the overall narrative language features of the two translations and their general narrative styles are basically the same.Secondly,with Munday’s classification of narrative point of view,there are four planes of narrative point of view: the psychological;ideological;the spatial-temporal;and the phraseological and each plane has linguistic markers.According to the writing features of the novel,this study selects one linguistic marker on each plane which includes the transitivity,modality,deixis and the non-standard linguistic forms.It analyzes the specific differences in the reappearance of the original narrative point of view,which finds that the two versions adopt different translation strategies of translating the original narrative point of view:(1)Transitivity: when translating the mental process of “I thought”,“I knew” and“I saw”,Cheng’s translation makes more use of omission,while Li’s version includes more instances of modification and transforms the mental process into other types of transitivity.(2)Modality: In translating the epistemic and deontic modality,Li intends to remain the expressions of modality,while higher frequencies of omission and modification exist in Cheng’s translation.(3)Deixis: in the translation of the spatial deictic adverb “here”,both of the two versions have omissions,but Li’s translation,in contrast,omits less and intends to alter the wording.(4)For the pinyin and some non-standard linguistic forms that relate to cultural differences in the original text,Cheng’s version tends to use more free translations but considers the cultural factors less.On the basis of retaining the meaning of original text,Li also gives consideration to the traditional Chinese culture in his translations,which is beneficial for the readers to understand the original text.Thirdly,there are more omissions and modifications in Cheng’s version in terms of the reproduction of the original narrative features,while Li’s version retains the narrative style and language characteristics of the source text,which reproduces the original narrative point of view better.The first person narrative point of view is the most distinctive narrative feature of the novel,so whether this feature can be displayed to readers through its translation is an important standard to measure the quality of the translation.The narrative structure of Li’s translation is more in line with the original narrative style,therefore,in terms of the reproduction of the narrative point of view,Li’s version is more expressive.Based on the corpus method,this study analyzes the narrative features in two Chinese versions of The Joy Luck Club,which tries to summaries the similarities and differences between the two versions in interpreting the original narrative point of view.It also provides data and theoretical support for evaluating the quality of translations and certain reference for the relative studies which explore the translations of the narrative style.In the context of cultural interactions,it is vital for western countries to comprehend the Chinese culture.Meanwhile,studies on translations of Chinese American literature are noteworthy for the intercultural communications.