A Corpus-Based Study on Liu Yukun’s Translation Style as Reflected in Folding Beijing

Abstract

Folding Beijing, written by Hao Jingfang and later translated by the famed science fiction writer Liu Yukun (also known as Ken Liu), has been a hit overseas, promoting the spread of Chinese culture and winning the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2016. This paper will take Liu Yukun's translation as an example, using quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze Liu Yukun's translation style. The corpus technology, the software Antconc, is used to construct the self-built corpus of Folding Beijing translated by Liu Yukun. And then the data analysis is expounded from the aspects of standard type-token ration (STTR), lexical density and word frequency, average sentence length and passive voice sentences, and narrative tenses. Based on the big data and corpus technology, it is found that the translation of Folding Beijing is basically faithful to the original text, and at the same time has its own unique style, which is close to the habits of the target language.