A Corpus-based Study on Translation Norms of Prose: Taking Zhu Ziqing's The View of My Father's Back as an Example

Abstract

This paper builds a small-scale corpus consisting of Zhu Ziqing's original work The View of My Father's Back and its English translations by Zhang Peiji, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. Through the corpus, the lexical and syntactic features of prose are studied to explore the translation norms of prose. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of Zhang's and Yangs' translations shows a tendency towards conventionalized expectations at the levels of words and sentences. This study hopes to provide translators with helpful insights on translating Chinese prose and promote overseas dissemination of Chinese prose works and cultural communication.