The Translator's voice is the "second" voice in a translated narrative. By tracing a set of textual cues, the translator's voice embedded in the discourse may come to light. This study is based on a ...self-constructed bilingual parallel corpus which adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal the translator's voice in six English versions of the Chinese classic
. WordSmith 8.0, CLAWS POS Tagger, and Readability Analyzer were used to analyze the data and investigate the lexical, syntactic, and textual features of the translations of
by David Collie, James Legge, Ku Hungming, Ezra Pound, Chan Wing-Tsit, and Andrew Plaks, respectively. Paratexts of translation-prefaces, introductions, translator's notes, footnotes, and so on, as well as representative examples, were also analyzed by close reading. The findings suggest that each translator's cultural identity, historical background, and motives for producing the translation are made manifest through various linguistic and non-linguistic choices. This study demonstrates that the translator's voice, which is always present along with the author's voice and may take various forms, is deeply associated with the cultural and ideological constructs in which the act of translation is embedded. It is hoped that the results of this research will contribute to an enhanced understanding of the translation and overseas dissemination of the Chinese classic
, and further the study of the translator's voice with the aid of corpus technology.
Based on a parallel corpus of Chinese-English texts, this article utilizes corpus tools to examine the translation styles of four versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji from three levels and nine variables. It ...is found that different translators have different perspectives and focuses when dealing with the same source text, thus presenting different translation styles. At vocabulary level, Sanders’ translation has the highest lexical density, Black’s translation has the richest lexical variation, and Pratt’s translation has the lowest lexical richness. At the sentence level, Lin’s translation fluctuated more obviously in the use of alternating long and short sentences, while the changes in Sanders’ translation are less obvious, and Pratt’s translation has the lowest average sentence length, which means this version tends to use more short sentences to translate the original text. At the level of discourse, Black’s translation has a more compact plot and a tighter contextual connection, making the translation more readable and narrative. The distinct styles of the four translations are mainly due to the difference in the translators’ aims and their historical backgrounds.
In audiovisual translation, stylometry can be used to measure formal-aesthetic fidelity. We present a corpus-based measure of syntactic complexity as a feature of language style. The methodology ...considers hierarchical dimensions of syntactic complexity, using syllable counting and dependency parsing. The test material are dialogues of several characters from the TV show “Two and a Half Men”. The results show that characters do not differ syntactically among themselves as much as might be expected, and that, despite a general tendency to level differences even more in translation, the changes in syntactic complexity between the original and translation depend mostly on the respective character-feature combination.
No agreement has yet been reached as to whether translators are visible or not in translation. To answer this question, we first chose Lin Yutang and James Legge as cases, supplemented their ...translations with their originals, and then applied Principal Component Analysis along with N-MFW metrics to the texts for their stylistic features. In our cases, we found that (1) for each translator, the styles of their originals and translations vary; (2) for both translators, the styles of their translations converge for the same source text; (3) the two translators preserve only part of their stylistic fingerprints in their translations, suggesting the existence of a powerful compensation mechanism. Our findings bring new insights into the translator's style, help settle the (in)visibility dispute, and illustrate effective metrics for developing translator identification tools.
A wave of literary retranslations was occurring at the beginning of the 21st century, due to various factors including the ageing of previously translated texts, ideological considerations in ...connection with changing cultural norms, and the ever-continuing search for the perfect translation. The three aforementioned factors for retranslation share at least one overarching consideration the translator s desire to leave a trace in cultural history and literature by creating a personal, contemporary and fully acceptable and at the same time artistically innovative interpretation of the great works of World Literature . The article considers the diachronic plurality of Ukrainian retranslations of Shakespeare s tragedies based on the creative potential of the target language culture. The characteristic of artistic methods of the XIX XXI centuries (Romanticism, classicism, neoclassicism, neo-baroque, modernism, and postmodernism) is given. Literary schools, which include Ukrainian retranslations of Shakespeare s tragedies of the XIX XXI centuries, are substantiated. The synthesis of appropriate artistic method and individual style of translation is analyzed. The goal of the research is to reveal the diachronic plurality variability of different Shakespeare s tragedies Ukrainian retranslations, conditioned by the literary style of the corresponding epoch as a component of spiritual culture. The research incorporates the following general research methods: ? analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, observation and abstraction for substantiation the theoretical foundations of the literary process of the XIX-XXI centuries; ? methods of literary analysis (philological, historical and comparative) for systematization the literary theory achievements and better understanding the essence of artistic methods and literary trends of the respective epoch; ? comparative analysis and translation analysis methods to compare, on the one hand, time-remote original text with different Ukrainian retranslations, and on the other hand, different Ukrainian retranslations with each other in order to identify specific features of individual translation style. As a material of the research, six different Ukrainian retranslations of Shakespeare s tragedy Hamlet performed by M. Starytsky (1882), P. Kulish (1899), Yu. Klen (1930), G. Kochur (1935), L. Hrebinka (1939), and Yu. Andrukhovich (2000) were chosen. For the greatest clarity, the comparison of translations is carried out on a short fragment from the tragedy Hamlet s monologue To be or not to be The study showed that cultural reality is determined by language, which specifies of the communicative system of linguistic and cultural society, which, in its turn, contributes to the creation of the linguistic reality. The text of the translation mediates the link between cultures and the context, which determines its ability to bring a sense of interacting cultures. The translation reflects the translator s individuality, formed in different historical conditions, his aesthetic and social views, which are different from the author s views. The variability of the diachronic plurality of different Ukrainian retranslations of Shakespeare s tragedies is determined by the literary style of the epoch as a component of spiritual culture and the individual style of translation.
The exultation of another Wang, Feng; Washbourne, Kelly
Orbis litterarum,
February 2020, Volume:
75, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The Beat writers' influence on world letters is well known, but far less understood is their translational ethos that brought the world to American writing. This study offers insight into a Beat ...philosophy of translation, whether formalized or implicit. What emerges is a picture of an expansive poetics that puts translation in the service of a project of identity‐formation that actively chose its confederates and precursors from all over the world's language traditions. For the Beats, translation was sympathy and identification both textual and biographical, sometimes to the point of projection and creative misreading, and always with a sensibility recognizably tied to their place and time, a Beat translation style. They blurred the lines between original and translation like few generations of writers, including through interpolation, “shift linguals,” homage, and other kinds of polyphonic textures. While some of its key figures are already understood in their translatorial dimension, considered as a whole, the Beat poets' theories and practices of translation reveal the group to be more multicultural, and more multilingually networked, than perhaps had hitherto been thought.
Although co-translation has received considerable scholarly attention recently, how co-translated texts converge and diverge stylistically, and how co-translators affect translated texts and each ...other remain under-researched. Based on two specialized corpora, this paper innovatively employs L2SCA and MAT to investigate the various stylistic and linguistic features of A Hero Born (translated by Anna Holmwood) and A Bond Undone (translated by Gigi Chang), English translations of the two consecutive volumes of (shè diāo yīng xióng zhuàn), a Chinese wuxia novel by Jin Yong. It then explores the dynamics of collaboration between the two translators in translating and promoting Jin Yong's wuxia novels, based on interview records, email exchanges, and public discourses. The study reveals that the two translations are homogenized to a considerable degree and at various syntactic and lexico-grammatical levels, and that the two translators' discourses concerning Jin Yong's wuxia are also essentially identical. These similarities are attributed to several factors. In particular, Holmwood, as the principal translator and co-literary agent of the translation project, has played a dominant role and has put her "fingerprints" on Chang's translation, thus considerably smoothing out stylistic divergences of their translated texts. The two translators have deftly co-projected Jin Yong's wuxia as modern, cosmopolitan, and entertaining, thus facilitating the reception of their translations. This study sheds new light on the dynamics of collaboration between literary translators and contributes to the research methodology of translation style.
Previous studies on translator’s or translation style have mostly focused on literary works. This study is a stylistic analysis of Chinese-language editorials and commentaries published in the Hong ...Kong Economic Journal (HKEJ) and their print and web versions of English translations. The study includes a corpus analysis of the original and translated news texts’ average sentence length, standardized type-token ratio, reporting verbs and high-frequency words. These are interpreted in relation to the translators’ personal attributes and the socio-cultural contexts to identify several major factors contributing to stylistic differences. This study finds that the news translation style is influenced by both source language linguistic features and target language conventions. The production of translated news texts involves the input of multiple agents, which is demonstrated in the collective traces of translation styles. The stylistic shifts between the original and translated news editorials and commentaries reflect the news outlet’s editorial stance and targeted readership. The empirical findings contribute to our understanding of the critical role stylistic features play in Chinese-to-English journalistic translation.
The exultation of another Wang, Feng; Washbourne, Kelly
Orbis litterarum,
02/2020, Volume:
75, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The Beat writers' influence on world letters is well known, but far less understood is their translational ethos that brought the world to American writing. This study offers insight into a Beat ...philosophy of translation, whether formalized or implicit. What emerges is a picture of an expansive poetics that puts translation in the service of a project of identity‐formation that actively chose its confederates and precursors from all over the world's language traditions. For the Beats, translation was sympathy and identification both textual and biographical, sometimes to the point of projection and creative misreading, and always with a sensibility recognizably tied to their place and time, a
Beat translation style.
They blurred the lines between original and translation like few generations of writers, including through interpolation, “shift linguals,” homage, and other kinds of polyphonic textures. While some of its key figures are already understood in their translatorial dimension, considered as a whole, the Beat poets' theories and practices of translation reveal the group to be more multicultural, and more multilingually networked, than perhaps had hitherto been thought.
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