A Corpus-based Analysis of Attitudinal Changes in Lin Yutang's Self-translation of Between Tears and Laughter
This addresses a gap in research on attitudinal shifts in self-translation for translation studies and corpus linguistics, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific case.
The study analyzed attitudinal changes in Lin Yutang's self-translation of 'Between Tears and Laughter' using corpus tools, finding significantly less anger in his self-translation (M=0.7755 vs. M=1.1036 in the original, p=0.0331) compared to no significant difference in a co-translated portion.
Attitude is omnipresent in almost every type of text. There has yet to be any relevant research on attitudinal shifts in self-translation. The Chinese version of Between Tears and Laughter is a rare case of self-translation and co-translation in that the first 11 chapters are self-translated by Lin Yutang, and the last 12 chapters by Xu Chengbin. The current study conducted a word frequency analysis of this book's English and Chinese versions with LIWC and AntConc, and made comparative research into Lin Yutang's attitudinal changes. The results show that due to different writing purposes and readerships, there is less anger in Lin's self-translation (M=0.7755, SD=0.2775) than in the first 11 chapters of the English original (M=1.1036, SD=0.3861), which is a significant difference (t=2.2892, p=0.0331). This attitudinal change is also reflected in the translations of some n-grams containing anger words. In contrast, there is no significant difference (t=1.88, p=0.07) between Xu's co-translation and the corresponding part of the original in attitude "anger". This paper believes that corpus tools can help co-translators keep their translation consistent in attitude.