AUTHOR=Meng Lingzi , Pan Feng 

TITLE=Using corpora to reveal style in translation: The case of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1034912

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1034912

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=This article reports on a corpus-based study of the English translation of Wang Anyi’s award-winning novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow [长恨歌, Chang Hen Ge] from the perspective of style. Using the keyword and concordance functions of corpus software packages AntConc and ParaConc, this research focuses on how the translator’s style reveals itself in the target text as well as how the style of the source text is represented in the target text. Findings show that the translators had a preference for contracted negative verb forms and expressions such as ‘bit’ over ‘little’, making the text more colloquial. In general, the rendering of the ST style tends not to be entirely faithful. A distinction between reader-centered and text-centered keywords (Mahlberg and McIntyre, 2011) was made. While the reader-centered ST keywords were, as expected, largely altered, the translation of text-centered ST keywords was also rewritten, contrary to expectations. Presumably, the translators tended to reduce the ambiguity of the source text, resulting in a more explicit target text. The paper argues that the translators chose to rewrite the translation to make it more understandable for the target audience, since it concerned a work from a source culture very different from the target culture.