中国城市概览的译者风格考察

On the Style of the Translators in the Translation of Chinese City Overviews—— A Corpus-based Comparative Study

Baker提出的考察"译者风格"的方法论一般以文学作品为考察对象,文章在其基础上改进方法论以公共叙事文本——中国城市概览为考察对象,以美国城市概览为类比语料进行参照,探究中国译者的翻译风格与原语作者的写作风格的异同。词语层面,中国译者词汇变化度上缺乏均衡性,整体上词汇变化度高于类比语料。句法层面,倾向于使用较长的复杂句进行表述,这使得译文呈现出相对于类比语料的复杂化趋势。此研究结论与贝克在文学文本翻译中发现的简化倾向相反,说明翻译的目的语特征和文本类型对译者风格都有重要影响。

The style of translator put forward by Mona Baker is usually examined with literary works. This paper probes into the style of Chinese translators in the translation of city overviews, with the city overviews of the United States as the comparative data. We aim to explore the differences in the style of Chinese translators and English writers. The research results show that, on the word level, Chinese translators vary greatly in the degree of word variety, with the type/token ratio frequently higher than the English writers. On the syntactic level, Chinese translators use longer, more complex sentences with more clauses. In a word, Chinese translators show a tendency of using more complicated linguistic structure in their translation, which is a totally different result from Baker＇ s. This paper concludes that the features of the target language and types of texts both exert significant influence upon the style of translators.