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The Frontiers of Society, Science and Technology, 2023, 5(9); doi: 10.25236/FSST.2023.050911.

Hearing Translator's Voice in Political Fables: A Corpus-based Study of the Chinese Translations of Animal Farm

Author(s)

Luo Lin

Corresponding Author:
Luo Lin
Affiliation(s)

Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, 000977, China

Abstract

This article sets out to investigate the voices of three renowned and influential translators – Rong Rude, Sun Zhongxu, and Lau Shiu-ming – in their Chinese translations of the political fable Animal Farm from the perspective of typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige) by means of the corpus-based approach. With Aixela's classification of translation method and strategy for culture-specific items, and the assistance of self-built parallel corpus model in Sketch Engine, a quantitative analysis is adopted. According to the identification and statistics of the annotated translation approaches and strategies for all chengyu and sizige used by the translators in the three Chinese versions, it can be found that the translators' voices can be perceived in their works from their applications of such kind of culture-specific terms. Afterwards, the author qualitatively analyzes the three translators' motivations of reflecting their voices on the basis to reader reception theory. This corpus-based study of translator's voice is in the hope of providing theoretical reference for the two fields of translation studies and Animal Farm.

Keywords

Corpus-based Study of Literary Translation; Translator’s Voice; Translation Approach and Strategy; Typical Four-character Chinese Idioms

Cite This Paper

Luo Lin. Hearing Translator's Voice in Political Fables: A Corpus-based Study of the Chinese Translations of Animal Farm. The Frontiers of Society, Science and Technology (2023) Vol. 5, Issue 9: 66-73. https://doi.org/10.25236/FSST.2023.050911.

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