Uncovering the functional aspect of translator style: corpus stylistic insights

This study employs a corpus stylistic approach to examine the functional aspect of translator style. It introduces and explores the concept of “translator’s functional style” through a case study of the Chinese-English translation of Lao She’s Er Ma. To analyze functional styles, the study develops an analytic framework that explores how different translators reconstruct the literary theme of “Diasporic Chinese” in their translations. This involves an examination of how the translators render thematic words and handle the resulting lexico-semantic patterns. The findings reveal notable disparities in the translators’ functional styles, which are influenced by multiple translatorial and extra-translatorial factors, including the translators’ backgrounds, motivations, preferences, interpretation, patronage, and technological development. The study argues that future translator style research should decrease dependence on corpus linguistic methodologies, which are meant to analyze general language features and variations, and establish an independent framework that enables more effective stylistic explorations beyond the formal aspect.