Looking for translator's fingerprints: a corpus-based study on Chinese translations of Ulysses

This study investigates the translator’s fingerprints as manifested in their style of translation. It reports a case study of two Chinese translations of Ulysses, adopting a corpus-assisted approach. The parallel subcorpora comprise Joyce’s Ulysses and the Chinese versions by Xiao (Tran. Ulysses. Yilin Press, Nanjing, 1994) and Jin (Tran. Ulysses. People’s Literature Publishing House, Beijing, 1997), and the comparable subcorpora include Xiao’s original writings in Chinese. Comparison shows that Xiao leaves some traces of lexical idiosyncrasy in his composition and translation. On the syntactic level, comparison reveals that Xiao post-positions more adverbial clauses in translation than in composition. This indicates that the translator’s fingerprints are left on the translated text, as a result both of their linguistic idiosyncrasy and of the interference and constraints of the language they are dealing with in translation.