《海军战略》两译本军事翻译风格对比研究——基于自建平行对比语料库

An Investigation of the Style in Translations of Military Works:A Case Study of Naval Strategy Based on Self-built Comparative Corpus

军事翻译是一个长期被翻译学界忽视的领域。鉴于风格在军事译著的传播过程中起着重要的作用,文章利用语料库,探讨不同军事译者的翻译风格。文章选取海权理论家马汉名著《海军战略》的两个译本,即民国时期的玄楼译本和当代的蔡鸿幹译本,自建双语平行对比语料库,分析类符/形符比、高频词、平均句长等参数,发现两位译者的风格在词汇、句法和语篇层面均具有非常显著的差异。造成这种差异的原因包括译者身份、目标读者、目标语的历时风格以及意识形态等。文章有助于我们深入认识军事翻译的风格并考察其成因。

Translations of military works are severely under-researched areas neglected by translation scholars.As style plays an essential role in the dissemination of military translations,this paper makes use of corpus to explore the translation styles of different military translators.It presents a comparative case analysis on the styles of two translations of Naval Strategy authored by Alfred Mahan,a famous sea power theorist.One is the Xuan Lou translation in the Republic of China,and the other is contemporary Cai Honggan translation.Aided by a self-built bilingual parallel comparison corpus,the paper analyzes the stylistic differences between Xuan Lou's and Cai Honggan's Chinese translations by parameters such as class type/token symbol ratio,high frequency words and average sentence length.The results show that great stylistic differences exist between these two translations at lexical,syntactical and textual levels.Further investigation reveals that such differences result from multiple factors such as translators'identities,target readerships,diachronic style of target language and ideology.This research is helpful in advancing our understanding of military translations and the causes of their formation.