Corpus stylistics in translation studies: two modern Chinese translations of Don Quijote

Abstract

This article aims to provide a quantitative account of the stylistic differences between two modern Chinese translations of Don Quijote in terms of the use of language archaism. For this purpose, a number of statistical techniques applicable in corpus linguistics have been used, which exemplifies the foregrounding of quantitative primary data. The article provides an original interdisciplinary study which attempts to integrate research methods adapted from different areas of research, e.g. textual statistics, corpus linguistics, literary stylistics and translation studies, into the development of an emerging field known as corpus stylistics.