基于语料库的《孙子兵法》英译比较研究——以郑麐与格里菲斯译本为例

Corpus-Assisted Comparative Study of English Translations of Sun Tzu: The Art of War——Taking Zheng Lin’s and Samuel Griffith’s Translation as an Example

《孙子兵法》是中华军事文化的经典之作,是在海外影响力最大的中国典籍之一,其英译史长达百余年。然而,现有英译研究以定性为主,缺乏基于语料库的定量研究,在客观性与科学性上不尽人意。选取中国与美国英译《孙子兵法》第一人郑麐1946年译本和格里菲斯(Samuel Griffith)1963年译本创建语料库。从词汇、句子和语篇等层面进行两个译本的译文语言特征比较,并以最高频主题字“地”为例,比较两位译者的翻译方法。以此揭示译者背景身份、人生经历、翻译目的、读者对象等对翻译所起的隐形的操控作用。

Sun Tzu:The Art of War,the most famous work in traditional Chinese military culture,has enjoyed a history of English translation of more than one hundred years and is among the Chinese classics which have a great influence in the world.However,the existing English translation studies are mainly qualitative,which are less objective and scientific compared with corpus-based quantitative studies.The author of this paper chooses the first English translation of Sun Tu in China and in the United States,that is,Zheng Lin's translation which was published in 1946 and Samuel Griffith's translation which was published in 1963,and establishes a parallel corpus of them with the Sun Tzu's original text.Based on this corpus,the author conducts a comparative study of the two translation's linguistic features from the word level,sentence level and discourse level,and takes the most frequent topic character"di"as an example to compare the two translators'translation methods.The aim of this study is to uncover the invisible manipulation of translator's various factors on translation,such as his background,life experience,translation motive,readership and so on.