Point of View in Translator's Style: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Two Chinese Translations of Moment in Peking

1. Introduction

As a typical China-themed work written in English, Moment in Peking has been a huge success among overseas readers since it was published in New York in 1939, which even made its author Lin Yutang nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975. The novel is a representative work that vividly introduces and depicts the society and life of early twentieth-century China to the western world. Since published by John Day Company in 1939, Moment in Peking has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish, Italian and other languages. According to Bu (2017), there are seven Chinese translations of Moment in Peking (see Table 1), of which only three corresponding Chinese translations are complete translations: Jinghuayanyun translated by Zhen Tuo and Ying Yuanjie, Jinghuayanyun translated by a Chinese professor of foreign languages Zhang Zhenyu, and Shunxijinghua translated by Yufei, the son of a well-known Chinese prose writer Yu Dafu. Regarding Yu Dafu as the ideal translator of Moment in Peking, Lin Yutang authorized his good friend Yu Dafu to translate the novel into a Chinese version in 1939. However, died in the war, Yu Dafu failed to finish the translation of Moment in Peking. Considering Lin Yutang’s dissatisfaction with Zhen Tuo and Ying Yuanjie’s translation, this paper selects Zhang Zhenyu’s and Yufei’s translations as the research object.

The translations of Moment in Peking have attracted considerable attention from scholars from inside and outside China. Researchers have primarily conducted theoretical research on the translation of Moment in Peking from different perspectives, e.g., cultural translation (Zhi, 2009; Dong, 2013; Cao & Jia, 2018; Zhao, 2019; Ke & Zou, 2021), the comparison of different translations (Liu & Ren, 2010; Wang & Jiang, 2012; Zhang, 2012; Xing, 2017), and the novel’s translation and dissemination in China (Zhang, 2014; Cai, 2019). However, relevant empirical studies (Zhao et al., 2017; Wang & Liu, 2019) remain largely unexplored. More empirical studies on the translation of Moment in Peking, especially corpus-driven studies, are worth more attention from scholars. The present study investigates the translator’s styles in two Chinese translations of Moment in Peking based on the self-built parallel corpus of Moment in Peking (PCMP) and the modern Chinese novel sub-corpus of the Chinese Corpus Retriever for Linguistic Attributes (CCRL).