Locality of the foreign-language translator and the native-language translator

This chapter provides a comparison between the foreign-language translator and the native-language translator through an analysis of Anthony Yu&s;s and Julia Lovell&s;s English translations of the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West . The chapter examines possible differences in translation between Julia Lovell, a native English (L1) translator, and Anthony Yu, a non-native English (L2) translator. To explore this, a comparable corpus of the two translations is constructed and subjected to a corpus-based word cluster and keyword cluster analyses of both structural and functional characteristics of the most frequent lexical bundles in Lovell&s;s and Yu&s;s English versions. The analysis of lexical bundles suggests that Lovell used more noun and prepositional phrases, whereas Yu used more verb phrases and referential expressions. The analysis of key clusters suggests that Lovell used more first-person pronouns and verb phrases, whereas Yu adopted the Pinyin system in naming the characters in the novel. These stylistic differences may be attributable to the translators’ locality, given that one is a native English translator and the other a non-native English translator.