Mapping Translator’s Style in the English Translation of Contemporary Chinese Literature: A Bibliometric and Content-Analysis Approach

Abstract

With the continued international circulation of contemporary Chinese literature, research on translator’s style has attracted growing scholarly attention; however, the field still lacks a systematic review of existing findings. This paper combines bibliometric with qualitative content-analysis to review and evaluate studies of the translator’s style in the English translations of contemporary Chinese literature. The review finds that the literature has primarily focused on prominent prominent translators from major English-speaking countries. In terms of research approaches, the literature falls broadly into two types: corpus-based quantitative studies and mixed-method studies combining corpus-based quantitative analysis with qualitative interpretation. Corpus-based approaches have become dominant in this field, with studies generally adopting target text-oriented, source text-oriented, and combined designs. The reviewed literature also shows that translator’s style is often characterised in terms of a tendency towards “simplification”. Existing studies exhibit several shortcomings, including the mismatch between the volume of research and the scale of contemporary Chinese literary translation, the narrow range of research subjects, a lack of conceptual clarity, and methodological weaknesses in corpus-based analysis. Future research should further develop its theoretical concepts, methodological design, and empirical scope so as to build a more robust framework for the study of translator’s style.