A Corpus-Based Study of Translator’s Style in Bronze and Sunflower: Linguistic and Cultural Perspectives

Abstract

A translator’s style is the distinctive linguistic and cultural choices that differentiate one translator from others and from the original author. Helen Wang is the English translator of Bronze and Sunflower and receives the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation for this work, which has drawn increasing scholarly attention to her translation style. This study employs the corpus analysis tool #LancsBoxX to investigate Helen Wang’s stylistic features through a Chinese English parallel corpus of the novel, compared with the General Fiction Corpus in the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus as a reference. The analysis examines her tendencies regarding both linguistic patterns and cross-cultural strategic translation. The findings reveal that, at the linguistic level, Helen Wang’s translation aligns closely with original English fiction in standardised type/token ratio (STTR), moving average type/token ratio (MATTR), lexical density, and mean sentence length and word length. This suggests a strong influence of the linguistic norms of the target language. At the cultural level, however, her style diverges, particularly in the transliteration of personal names, place names and historical terms, which reflects the author’s narrative tone and preserves the cultural significance in the source text. Overall, the study offers insights into corpus-based investigations of translator’s style and contributes to broader discussions on stylistic variation in children’s literature translation.