A Corpus-Based Study on the Translation Style of the English Version of Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Abstract

This study takes the English translation of Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow as its research object. Based on the Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of Mao Dun Literary Prize-Winning Works, it adopts a mixed quantitative and qualitative method to conduct a multi-dimensional investigation into the linguistic features and translation style of the target text. Quantitatively, with the aid of corpus tools, this research systematically calculates key indicators at the lexical and syntactic levels of the translation (including standardized type-token ratio, high-frequency word distribution, average sentence length, etc.), and carries out a comparative analysis with reference to the Translation English Corpus (TEC). Qualitatively, it undertakes a close reading of the translator’s concrete translation strategies by examining linguistically distinctive units with prominent stylistic significance, such as four-character structures, proper nouns, proverbs and poetic lines. The findings reveal that at the lexical level, the translation shows a certain tendency of simplification, with its lexical richness slightly lower than that of the reference corpus. At the syntactic level, the average sentence length of the translated text is notably longer, and the translator tends to reconstruct the rhythmic flow of long sentences in the original work through coordinate structures and punctuation devices. At the cultural and rhetorical levels, the translator mostly adopts foreignization-oriented translation strategies, retaining the original cultural imagery and linguistic rhythm to a considerable extent by means of transliteration, literal translation and contextual compensation. On the whole, under the coordination of the multi-layered strategies of “lexical simplification, syntactic complexity and cultural foreignization”, the translation realizes the cross-linguistic reproduction of the original style. Methodologically, this study integrates corpus-based empirical analysis and close textual reading, which helps to deepen the multi-dimensional understanding of literary translation style.