A Corpus-based Study Of Helen Wang’s Translator’s Style

In the year of 2016,Chinese writer of children’s literature Cao Wenxuan was awarded the International Hans Christian Andersen Award for his masterpiece Bronze and Sunflower and its English-translated version also won the Maishi Children’s Literature Translation Award in 2017,which has been highlighted as a prime example of “going global” for Chinese children’s literature.Currently,many studies have been carried out on Cao Wenxuan’s works from a variety of perspectives,but most of these focus on the text quality of his translated versions or the mode of translation.Few studies pay attention to the translator behind the translation action and there is a lack of investigation into Helen Wang’s translator’s style.Under the guidance of corpus-based translation studies,this thesis selects all the translated works of Helen Wang originally written by Cao Wenxuan for the research and builds Helen Wang’s translational bilingual parallel corpus.Meanwhile,the sub-corpus of literature of PATTIE is selected as the reference corpus.This thesis makes a comparative study of Helen Wang’s preferred use of language at the lexical,syntactic and textual levels,explores the factors that contribute to the formation of her translator’s style,and then discusses its influence on the dissemination of her translated works,which is expected to inspire native translators of children’s literature and help Chinese children’s literary works spread to the other side of the world.Research shows that Helen Wang’s translation has increased the acceptance of her translated works;both internal and external factors help to shape her unique translator’s style.The major findings are summarized as follows.At the lexical level,Helen Wang intentionally reduces the lexical diversity and information load capacity of the source texts,but the mean word length is slightly higher than that of the reference corpus,which indicates that she uses more longer words to express specific meanings;she is good at employing transliteration to satisfy her translation needs.At the syntactic level,she tends to use short sentences and increase the total amount of punctuation.At the same time,in an attempt to make the translated texts more cohesive and coherent,she skillfully adds different kinds of conjunctions to achieve a smooth effect.At the textual level,she uses more personal pronouns and does well in reorganizing the texts with regard to sentence order,the number of paragraphs,and adjustment of information.The translated texts,with high readability,are less challenging linguistically,which meet the expectations of the target readers.