Keywords
Da sheng bian
Translator style
Submitted : 2023-11-25
Accepted : 2023-12-10
Published : 2023-12-25
Abstract
Da Sheng Bian, a significant work on obstetrics and gynecology that emerged in the early Qing Dynasty, was initially published as “A Treatise on Midwifery” in 1842 by William Lockhart, a British missionary to China. In 1894, John G. Kerr, an American missionary, translated the text as “The Tat Shang Pin”. This paper conducts a comparative study of the two English translations using a self-constructed English-Chinese parallel corpus of Da Sheng Bian. The study explores the translation styles of the two translators by examining the token-types ratio and frequency at the lexical level, mean sentence length at the syntactic level, and the use of conjunctions at the discourse level. The observed differences in translation styles between the two translations are analyzed in relation to the translators’ backgrounds and translation strategies.
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