英语开题报告模板

毕业设计（论文）开题报告

（含文献综述、外文翻译）

题目基于语料库的《祝福》译者风格对比研究

A Corpus-based Contrastive Study of the

Translator's Styles in the Two English

Versions of “The New Year's

Sacrifice”

姓名颜阳天

学号

专业班级英语0706

所在学院外国语学院

指导教师（职称）刘育文（副教授）

二○一一年十二月三十日

毕业设计（论文）

开题报告

（包括选题的意义、可行性分析、研究的内容、研究方法、拟解决的关键问题、预期结果、研究进度计划等）

RESEARCH PROPOSAL

A Corpus-based Contrastive Study of the Translator's

Styles

in the Two English Versi ons of “The New Year's

Sacrifice”

1.Purpose and Significance

The conventional translation study is usually based on qualitative and cognitive approaches, which lead to the lack of abundant evidence and data in the course of analysis. In western countries, some significant papers by Mona Baker indicate the inception of the corpus-based translation studies and a large number of insightful researches were made in the last twenty years. However, this quantitative method has not been adopted until the 21st century, and the domestic academic level of corpus and its relative studies are still at its infancy.

The purpose of this thesis lies in using the quantitative method facilitated by computer parallel corpora to compare and contrast the stylistic features of two English versions of Lu Xun’s novel “The New Year’s Sacrifice”, namely, one translated by Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang and the other by William A. Lyell.

This thesis tries to apply the latest approach to contrastive study of translations, which features abundant statistics and data analysis for stylistic and linguistic evidence from the two selected translations with an aim to provide more objective and scientific findings compared with conventional qualitative translation studies.

This will be the first thesis on translation studies from the perspective of Corpus Linguistics by a student from Zhejiang University City College.

2.Current Literature Review

First things first, the basic concepts and methodology come from several classical textbooks in Corpus Linguistics, Translation Studies and Stylistics. Graeme Kennedy’s An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics, John Sinclair’s Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, and Anthony Woods’s Statistics in Language Studies all must be read as an introductory guidance which present a panoramic theoretical overview on Corpus Linguistics. Concerning Stylistics, Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short’s Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose and David Hoover’s Some Approaches to Corpus Stylistics show the theoretical background and practical steps of conventional stylistic case studies. For Translation Studies, Yang Xiaorong’s Introduction to Translation Criticism is a well-acknowledged book on the philosophy and methodology in this field.

Not surprisingly, great advantages could be easily seen if Corpus Linguistics, Translation Studies and Stylistics are combined comprehensively. The adoption of corpus in translation studies began in the early 1990s. “Recognizing the potential for using corpora in translation research in the early 1990s, Mona Baker made a number of suggestions on which much corpus-based analysis of translation has sub sequently been founded” (Olohan 35-56).

David Hoover, in his paper Some Approaches to Corpus Stylistics, claims that corpus stylistics can be valuable to literary studies. He says that with the help of corpus linguistics we can explore the degree to which an author has succeeded in creating distinct individual voices within a novel, which will be of great importance in stylistic studies. Besides, the author holds that corpus can also be equally useful to analyze short texts, which provides a theoretical framework for self-built corpus in stylistic studies.

And Baker’s suggestion was introduced into China by Zhang Meifang (张美芳) in 2002. Then the corpus-based translation studies have witnessed great progress in the following years which provides precious inspiration and suggestion for this thesis.

Then, as for the relevant studies in recent years, two papers and one book are of great reference value. The book is Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies by Maeve Olohan, one of Mona Baker’s colleagues, which provides several basic case studies concerning using corpora in