Point of View in Translator's Style

Abstract

Based on self-built parallel and comparable corpora, this paper explores the translator's style manifested in two Chinese translations of Moment in Peking (one by Zhang Zhenyu and the other by Yu Fei). The findings demonstrate that the corpus statistics, such as standardized TTR, lexical density, mean sentence length, frequencies of reduplicated words and the reporting verb, are significant for distinguishing translator's styles. Quantitative analysis shows that Yu's translation is embedded with fewer content words, while Zhang's translation uses less diversified vocabulary and shorter sentences. Qualitative analysis displays that Yu tends to use more words full of Chinese characteristics, such as reduplicated words and corresponding Chinese idioms. At the sentence level, Yu's translation is more faithful to the English source texts, while Zhang's translation is closer to the non-translated Chinese language, such as Zhang's use of synonymous idioms in the translation of English parallel structure as well as frequent word-order modification in the translation of reporting verb “ask”.