Translator’s voice appraisal in female character’s characterization of four English translations of Luotuo Xiangzi

Luotuo Xiangzi, a landmark work of modern Chinese literature, has been retranslated into English multiple times since its initial success in the United States. This study investigates the translators’ voices in the characterization of Huniu, one of the novel’s most memorable female figures, across four English versions by Evan King, Jean James, Shi Xiaojing, and Howard Goldblatt. Drawing on a self-constructed bilingual parallel corpus, it applies a modified characterization framework together with a three-dimensional model of the translator’s voice appraisal—loudness, pitch, and timbre—by qualitative content analysis and Python-assisted quantitative methods. The findings show that King amplified Huniu’s shamelessness and assertiveness, James softened her portrayal with fewer interventions, Shi preserved her emotional depth while favoring domestication, and Goldblatt significantly softened her vulgar traits through heavy tonal modifications. Variations in lexical choices, sentence length, and syntactic patterns corresponded closely to the dimensions of loudness, pitch, and timbre, demonstrating that translators’ voices actively reframe Huniu’s personality traits, emotional expressiveness, and cultural positioning. This study thus highlights the translator’s voice as a formative force in literary characterization and offers a replicable translator’s voice appraisal model for future translation research.