A Corpus-based Study of Translator’s Prosodic Styles: A Case Study of English Translations of Lisao by Yang Xianyi and Xu Yuanchong

Abstract: Based on M. Baker’s model and the translation purposes, the author built phonetically tagged English Translational and Monolingual Corpus of Lisao as well as a Chinese-English Vocal Parallel Corpus to conduct a descriptive comparative study of Yang’s Li Sao and Xu’s Sorrow after Departure from the prosodic perspective, namely rhythm, stress and rhyme. It is discovered that Yang is prone to adopt iambic meters, presenting clear fluctuations and intensively located stresses in the translation. The rhymes do not closely follow those of the Chinese original, yet they are the products after the translator’s own interpretation of the emotional meaning of Lisao, indicating his tendency of using domesticating strategy. In addition, there are more rhymes and consonances in Yang’s version. Xu’s translation is more featured by the sound effect, more akin to the rhythms of Chinese poetry and more intensive in sound variations. Its stresses are sporadic while antithetic, which also takes resemblance to Chinese poems. Besides, there is a high level of foreignization observed in the rhymes, with end rhymes appearing most frequently. The results are closely related to translators’ principles.

Key words: corpus; Lisao; translator’s style; prosody

ZHANG Keren VOLUME 1 APJHSS.pdf