A Study of the Translators’ Gender Awareness in To the Lighthouse from the Perspective of Corpus-assisted Critical Translation Study

Abstract

Critical translation study draws upon descriptive translation studies and critical discourse analysis. It tends to uncover the influence of the translator’s ideology on the target text through selecting the source text, making comparison with the target text, and examining the translation methods. Meanwhile, the addition of corpus expands the methodology of critical translation study from qualitative study to the new trend fusing qualitative and quantitative studies. Thus, the examination of ideology embedded in the linguistic features of target texts can be statistically evidenced with different types of data with significant difference, including typical sentence patterns and micro-linguistic features. To this end, this study establishes a parallel corpus featuring one source text (i.e., To the Lighthouse) with multiple target texts (i.e., two Chinese translations). Notably, the source text is selected due to its representative status in the feminist study authored by Virginia Woolf, and its two Chinese translations are selected due to their popularity in China, translated by Qu Shijing and Ma Ainong, respectively. Moreover, the personalized translations of gendered language in the source text are examined from both the macro and micro linguistic levels, thereby exploring the gender consciousness and its fluidity constructed by male and female translators in the two translations.