A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions’ Styles Of The Conquest Of Happiness

The Conquest of Happiness is a talented philosophical book written by Bertrand Arthur William Russell,a talented philosopher in the 20 th century.In this book,he explains to us the true meaning of happiness and gives appropriate advice on how to find it.It is of profound significance to people who are in a state of high pressure in modern society.Many articles have studied it from various angles,but few scholars have studied the differences existing in the two Chinese versions of The Conquest of Happiness,and most of the previous studies have focused on qualitative research and failed to analyze them objectively and scientifically.Based on this,this thesis uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to systematically analyze the two Chinese books of The Conquest of Happiness from the lexical and syntactic levels.Through the self-built small corpus and with the help of the retrieval software Wordsmith,Antconc,CUC＿Paraconc,this paper makes a search and analysis of the two Chinese versions of English philosophical prose The Conquest of Happiness translated by Fu Lei and Huang Han.It focuses on the following two resarch questions: 1.What are the differences in language features between Fu Lei’s version and Huang Han’s version of The Conquest of Happiness? 2.What are the causes of the stylistic differences between the two versions from the perspective of cultural translation theory?Through the comparative analysis,it is found that at the lexical level,TTR/STTR and lexical density in Huang’s version is higher than those of Fu’s version.The vocabulary richness of Huang’s version is higher than Fu’s version,and the amount of text information of Huang’s version is also larger;at the syntactic level,the average sentence length of Huang’s version is lower than that of Fu’s version than Fu’s version,but the stability of sentence is more higher than that of Fu’s version,and it has a better sense of experience when readers are reading.At the same time,different from Huang’s version,Fu’s version usage of language’s Europeanization is more obvious,especially in the use of the attribute “de”(的).Owing to the two translators living in different periods,and different social backgrounds,their different expressions in language,translation purposes and considerations for readers,they choose different strategies in their works to form their unique translation styles.The corpus-based approach provides new ideas,approaches to translation studies and even more avoids the subjectivity and incompleteness of researchers in translation studies,especially in contrastive translation studies.This thesis makes a contrastive study of the translation of The Conquest of Happiness to make a meaningful exploration for the spread and popularity of Russell’s ideas in China as well as the translators’ choice and operation of the translation.