Exploring translator’s style in children’s literature: A case study of Nicky Harman’s English translations of Huang Beijia’s two works

Abstract

Huang Beijia’s contemporary Chinese novels Wo Yao Zuo Hao Hai Zi (a contemporary realistic children’s novel, 1996) and Ye Feng Fei Wu (a historical novel for children, 2018), translated into English by Nicky Harman as I Want to Be Good (2020) and Flight of the Bumblebee (2023), offer valuable insights into translator’s style in rendering Chinese children’s literature for English readers. Building on Baker’s (2000) translator’s style in corpus-based translation studies (CTS) that manifests translator’s recurrent patterns, this study investigates Harman’s stylistic choices at the lexical, syntactic, and textual level to reveal how Chinese specific elements are represented for target readers. A self-built bilingual corpus (parallel and comparable; 398,531 words total) enables a mixed-methods approach, integrating quantitative metrics (such as keyword analysis, readability index by Qt Readability, etc.) with qualitative close reading. By analyzing typical translation examples and the para-texts of Harman’s translated works, this study aims to explore the reasons behind Harman’s translation style and the relationship between the translator’s views on translation and translation choices. The results reveal the existence of a distinctive translator’s style and show that vividness, purity and joy reflected in the original children’s literature as the ST style has been reproduced in Harman’s translation. A preference for contracted forms (’s,’ve, ’d, etc.) and more strategic and habitual use of certain collocations (such as the employment of “keep an eye on…”, “as far as the eye could see”, etc.), tentative efforts in balancing domestication and foreignization in the translation of Chinese four-character idioms, the multimodal interaction employed by Harman as her special consideration for the young readership, etc. have all contributed to Harman’s translator’s style in translating children’s literature. These findings will contribute to the study of translator’s style and deepen the research of the English translation and international dissemination of Chinese children’s literature under the methodology of corpus-based research.