A Comparative Study On Translators’ Styles Of The Secret Garden From George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Translation Theory

With the emergence and development of “cultural turn” and descriptive translation study,scholars from all walks of life have paid more and more attention to target-text-oriented translation.Also,scholars began to realize the important role of translators in cultural communication and pay attention to translators’ style.Combining quantitative and qualitative methods with using corpus tools,this thesis not only compares and analyzes the overall text features of the two translations,but also explores the strategies and techniques of the two translators,aiming to comprehensively judge and summarize the two translators’ styles from macro and micro aspects.Firstly,with the help of corpus tools,this study takes two Chinese translations of The Secret Garden,translated by Li Wenjun and Zhang Jianping,as the subject,conducting a quantitative analysis of the lexical and syntactic features of the two translations,so as to obtain objective text features and present the two translators’ styles on the whole,which can also provide some objective basis for the comprehensive judgement of the two translators’ styles.The analysis reveals that,relatively speaking,Li Wenjun’s translation has higher lexical density and modifying words appear more frequently in the translation,therefore its language expressions are richer and more varied;and Li’s translation has more long sentences and richer sentence patterns.While Zhang Jianping’s translation has lower lexical density and its language expressions are simpler,and its sentences are commonly shorter with less sentence patterns.But in general,the differences between the two translations at the lexical and syntactic levels are not too obvious,and they both better reflect the linguistic characteristics of children’s literature,have certain readability and meet readers’ expectations.Secondly,on the basis of the corpus analysis,using George Steiner’s hermeneutic theory as a guide,this thesis compares and qualitatively analyzes the two Chinese translations through case studies to explore the two translators’ styles reflected by their translation strategies in the four steps proposed by Steiner in detail.The analysis shows that the translator’s styles of Li Wenjun and Zhang Jianping in each of the four translation steps are distinctive: both translators show their affirmation of the value of the original work of The Secret Garden in the “trust” stage,believing that it has high translation value and praising the beautiful spirit conveyed by the work.In the“aggression” stage,having understanding the meaning of the original work,Li Wenjun and Zhang Jianping use various translation techniques and apply some interesting expressions to elaborate the connotation of the original text in a way that is pleasing to Chinese readers;then in the “incorporation” stage,the two translators show considerable differences in their choice of translation strategies: in order to maintain the balance between the original work and the translation,Li Wenjun mainly adopts the translation strategy of domestication and tries his best to transform the cultural elements of the original language that are unfamiliar to Chinese readers into expressions that are understandable through adaptation,variation and amplification,so as to facilitate readers’ understanding and bring the translation closer to readers.And Zhang Jianping mainly applies the translation strategy of foreignization,retaining the cultural elements of the original language through literal translation,borrowing and reduction,or reminding readers of the existence of heterogeneous culture,so as to convey the connotation of the original work in a more direct and straightforward way;finally,in the“compensation” stage,in order to compensate for the information in the original text that may have been lost by the translators after the first three translation steps,the two translators uses direct information additions and annotations in the text to consolidate the balance between the original and the translated work.To sum up,the translation styles of different translators reflect the efforts and ingenuity of the translators from the side.After this comparative analysis,the author hopes that this study will provide some references for the study of translator’s style and further enrich the study of the translation of The Secret Garden.