Abstract:
Translations of military works are severely under-researched areas neglected by translation scholars. As style plays an essential role in the dissemination of military translations, this paper makes use of corpus to explore the translation styles of different military translators. It presents a comparative case analysis on the styles of two translations of
Naval Strategy authored by Alfred Mahan, a famous sea power theorist. One is the Xuan Lou translation in the Republic of China, and the other is contemporary Cai Hong-gan translation. Aided by a self-built bilingual parallel comparison corpus, the paper analyzes the stylistic differences between Xuan Lou's and Cai Honggan's Chinese translations by parameters such as class type/token symbol ratio, high frequency words and average sentence length. The results show that great stylistic differences exist between these two translations at lexical, syntactical and textual levels. Further investigation reveals that such differences result from multiple factors such as translators' identities, target readerships, diachronic style of target language and ideology. This research is helpful in advancing our understanding of military translations and the causes of their formation.