A Corpus-Based Study on the Translation Style of Five English Versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji, Vol I

1. Introduction

The Fu Sheng Liu Ji (hereinafter referred to as “Fu”) is a biographical essay written by Shen Fu, a literati of the Qing Dynasty. The essay takes the activities of Shen Fu and his wife as the main line and records their home life and wanderings, as well as the art of living and art criticism. With its bright and fresh writing and sincere and touching plot, Fu has been called one of the most beautiful classical prose in China by Feng Qiyong (Wang, 2015). Among the 55 literary texts included in the Greater China Library, a translation project of Chinese cultural texts launched by the state, Fu is listed (Xu, 2015). The first English translation of Fu was made by Lin Yutang in the 1930s and has since become “world-famous” (Jin & Jin, 2000). In addition to Lin Yutang's translation (hereinafter referred to as Lin's translation), there are three other English translations of Fu: Shirley Black's translation published by Oxford University Press in 1960 (hereinafter referred to as Black's translation), Leonard Pratt & Chiang Su-Hui's English translation published by Penguin Press in the 1980s (hereinafter referred to as Pratt's translation), and the Graham Sanders translation published by Hackett Publishing in 2011 (hereinafter referred to as the Sanders’ translation). In addition, the author found a translation in the library of Tunghai University in Taiwan, it is an unpublished dissertation and only translated Volume 1 of the original text in 1960, and the translator is Wu Huei-Ching (hereinafter referred to as Wu’s translation). Black’s translation omitted the horticultural and botanical contents in volume 2, the temple and landscape episodes in volume 4, and part of the literary information for the reader's interest, while volume 1 remains relatively complete. Therefore, this study takes Volume 1 of Fu and its five English translations as the object of study and examines the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics of the different translations.