Abstract
Based on a corpus of Jia Pingwa’s novels and a reference corpus of English novels of local colorism, this chapter makes a stylistic comparison between direct and inverse translations of Jia’s novels in light of formal statistics, textual presentation mode and translation strategy. Research findings show that: (1) compared with non-translated English novels, translated English novels enjoy a larger vocabulary and direct translations are richer in lexical diversity than inverse translations; translated English novels have a higher information load than nontranslated English novels and direct translations are higher in information load than inverse translations; (2) in terms of textual presentation mode, Jia’s novels tend to start with description of the natural environment while nontranslated English novels focus more on portrayal of characters; (3) as far as translation strategy is concerned, direct translations of Jia’s novels are more likely to readjust word order of the original and provide additional information to achieve explicitation while inverse translations prefer to faithfully convey the original form and content. The authors maintain that difference in textual presentation mode of the same genre between different languages be taken into consideration by translators.
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Huang, L. (2015). Direct and Inverse Translations of Jia Pingwa’s Novels: A Corpus-Based Stylistic Comparison. In: Style in Translation: A Corpus-Based Perspective. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45566-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45566-1_6
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