| Among the various genres of modern and contemporary Chinese literature,novels have been the focus of literary translation with their wide market circulation channels and deep readers’ acceptance.Michael Berry,a renowned American sinologist and translator,has translated the representative literary works of many Chinese writers,such as Yu Hua,Wang Anyi and Ye Zhaoyan,into English since the 1990s,whose translation and introduction in the West has achieved great success.Studying his translation style is of great significance to the spreading of Chinese literature.Although Michael Berry hopes to "play the role of transparency" in his translation,whether his translation style is faithful to the original has become the focus of controversy in the field of translation.Based on Mona Baker’s theory on translation style,this paper combines qualitative research with quantitative analysis to explore the translation style of Michael Berry.In this study,three English-Chinese bilingual parallel corpora have been established,which were three translated texts of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow:A Novel of Shanghai,Nanjing 1937:A Love Story,To Live and their corresponding original novels.By means of using the English-Chinese bilingual parallel corpora,original texts written by Chinese contemporary novelists can be compared with Michael Berry’s translations to study his unique style of novel translation.This study uses corpus retrieval software,trying to answer the following questions:(1)What are the lexical and syntactic stylistic features of Michael Berry’s translation?How did Berry deal with Chinese four-character culture-loaded words and phrases?(2)How readable is Michael Berry’s translation?The following are the research findings:On the lexical level,Berry perpetually follows the expression of the original text,with language lacking richness in his translation,reflecting the translator’s faithfulness.When dealing with four-character Chinese culture-loaded words,Berry adopts diversified translation strategies such as literal translation,free translation,and corresponding translation.He tends to simplify complexity by not deliberately elaborating on the cultural connotations of vocabulary,thus lowering the reading threshold.On the syntactic level,Michael Berry uses cohesive devices to make his translation explicit with smooth and natural language,reflecting the translator’s creative processing.On researching of readability,various numerical values in Berry’s translation are almost close to the original novels,which shows that his overall translation strategy still focuses on representing the original text.In general,Michael Berry’s translation takes into account the culture of the target language and the reading habits of the target readers on the basis of faithfulness to the original text,which is of reference significance to the theoretical research and practice of contemporary Chinese novel translation in the future. |
