A Corpus-Based Study of the Translator’s Style of Two Versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji —Take Pratt & Chiang Su-hui’s and Graham Sander’s Versions as Examples

Abstract

Fu Sheng Liu Ji is not only an autobiographical prose written by Shen Fu in the Qing Dynasty, but also a love letter to his wife. So far, there have been four English versions of it, translated by Lin Yutang, Shirley M. Black, Leonard Pratt & Chiang Su-hui, and Graham Sanders respectively. Among them, Lin Yutang’s version has been widely studied, and Shirley M. Black’s version is different from the source text in terms of content and layout. Therefore, this research takes the co-translation version of Leonard Pratt & Chiang Su-hui and Graham Sanders’ version as the research object, builds a corpus, and adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods to make a comparison of the translator’s style between the two English versions from different perspectives—vocabulary, sentence, and discourse, analyzing the type/token ratio, lexical density, average word length, number of sentences, average sentence length and readability of the two versions. It is found that the type/token ratio, lexical density, average word length and average sentence length of Pratt & Chiang Su-hui’s version are lower than that of Sanders’ version, and Pratt & Chiang Su-hui’s version is easier to read than Sanders’ version.