Hypothesis testing in corpus-based literary translation studies

The main purpose of this chapter is to develop useful analytical frameworks for translation studies. The new analytical frameworks proposed will integrate quantitative and qualitative analysis of textual and contextual events and phenomena of translation. Three sets of relationship are highlighted to illustrate the usefulness of these new analytical schemes which are (1) the dependence relation between the source and the target text at various linguistic levels such as lexical, syntactic, grammatical and phraseological; (2) the dependence relation between translation and the target societal and cultural background; and (3) the dependence relation between the language of individual translations and the linguistic evolution of the target language at a general level. To illustrate the use of the new model of quantitative and qualitative analysis, this chapter offers a case study which compares the stylistic profile of Cervantes’s Don Quijote de La Mancha (1605) and its two modern Chinese versions by Yang Jiang in 1978 and by Liu Jingsheng in 1995.