葛浩文中国文学英译风格新探——基于历时、量化与文本细读的视角

A Revisit of Goldblatt’s Chinese Literature Translations and His Style

本文以葛氏期望的宏观和微观相结合的研究方法,从英汉词字比例、汉英句子对应比例与平均句长、回归文本三个维度,对葛氏翻译风格进行重新审视和描写,并挖掘其背后的成因。研究发现,译者风格研究须在史观视野下,结合译者的翻译生涯和文本内外的社会文化语境进行'宏观式'互动解读;研究方法上,除了基于翔实的数据,还须回归文本,做到具体问题具体分析。本研究期望对探索翻译研究历时、动态的多维视角有所借鉴。

Setting out with the controversy of the academia over Howard Goldbaltt’s English translations of Chinese novels,this paper aims at a revisit and description of the(change of his)translation style and delve into the possible reasons behind it.From both macro and micro perspectives,three parameters of a selection of twenty-two of his translations are investigated,which include the English-Chinese token ratios,the English-Chinese sentence alignment ratios and average length.Then with contextualised close reading,the study finds that research into translator style entails a macro historical(diachronical)perspective whereby style is scrutinized in synergy with both the translator’s career path and the socio-cultural context of the translation proper.In addition,interpretation of corpus data requires a close-up comparison of the specific texts involved.