Translators' Visibility and Invisibility in the Chinese Literary Translation of Brave New World: A Corpus-based Study

: In accordance with the quantitative analysis of all the empirical samples, namely, annotated chengyu and sizige and their corresponding English vocabulary in the selected materials – Brave New World and its two Chinese translations based on self-built parallel corpus in Sketch Engine, it can be found that domestication is the preferred strategy adopted by the two translators – Sun Fali and Chen Chao – in their texts, which represents their status – visibility – in the translation as well. Afterwards, the motivations of the translators' visibility are qualitatively analyzed from the viewpoints of translation aesthetics, Chang's theoretical statement on translator's visibility and invisibility in PRC, as well as the translators' personal linguistic habitus. The author hopes to promote a new methodology and perspective, namely, the corpus-based approach and typical four-character Chinese idioms ( chengyu and sizige ) into the field of translation studies, especially translator's visibility and invisibility.


Introduction
Since Baker as a pioneer to investigate translators' styles on the basis of the self-established parallel corpus and achieves the research results according to empirical data analysis in corpus models, the application of the corpus-based approach is increasingly wide in the field of translation studies, which also promote the birth of an innovative translation studies from a new perspectivecorpus-based translation studies [1].The further studies in relation to this field involve a variety of genres and perspectives, such as corpus-based studies of literary translation, corpus-based studies of interpreting.As for the field of literary translation studies by means of the corpus-based approach, it has been categorized into some more particular research viewpoints, including the studies on texts, translators, characterizations and images, as well as translation criticism.The research on translators has involved with translator's use of translation methods and strategies, translator's style, translator's creativity, as well as translator's views.
Aldous Huxley, born in 1894 and died in 1963, is an influential and significant English writer, whose works contain novels, essays, narratives, poems, etc.His most renowned masterpiece is his work of fiction Brave New World, a dystopian science fiction created in 1920s and known as "dystopia trilogy" together with Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin [2].His another work, Brave New World Revisited, the name of which appears to be in relation to Brave New World but actually a collection of essay about sociology, including his profound insights and predictions on the difficulties that the human beings will face on the aspects of environment, science and technology, politics, etc. in the 21th century2.
Sun Fali, one of the most famous and influential contemporary literary translator and scholar on literary translation studies in Chinese Mainland, is well-known for his significant Chinese translations of western literatures on fiction, opera, poem, as well as essay, such as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, A Tale of Two Cities, to name but two [3].Chen Chao is a contemporary young literary translator, whose most well-known masterpiece is the collection of Orwell' works, including novels, essays, book reviews, as well as autobiography, published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House as well.

The Studies on Translator's Visibility and Invisibility
In this field, invisibility, discussed in detail by Venuti, is used to "describe the translator's situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture" [4].In his further description from the research on English translation conditions of the United Kingdom and the United States, this term causes an "illusion of transparency" [4].Under the manipulation of this "illusory effect" [1], the translator modifies and polishes the source text into a highly fluent and readable one and the explicit reflections of the author's "personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text" but no stylistic or linguistic features of the source text, which gives the impression that it is the original but not a translation work, which can get the recognition and acceptation from most target publishers, critics and readers."The more fluent the translation, the more visible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text" [4].
Based on the above descriptions and interpretations of invisibility, the opposite term visibility can be naturally illustrated as the translator's functions or actions obviously shown in the target text, in which there are a variety of foreignizing elements and features and is not as fluent as those originals.On the contrary to invisibility, the more dysfluent the translation, the more visible the translator, and the more invisible the author or the meaning of the foreign text.
Based on the aforesaid illustrations, there are two translation strategies respectively called "domestication" and "foreignization" proposed by Venuti, which both stem from Schleiermacher's choices of two approaches offered for translators [4].In Venuti's classification, translator's invisibility is the result of domestication strategy while the form of visibility, correspondingly, is the result of foreignization for a quite long time.Venuti attempts not only to restore the translator's visibility, improve the translator's cultural position in the translation practice and simultaneously make the translator's contributions to the foreign text be paid attention by the wide application of foreignization, but also to challenge and effectively limit the target linguistic and cultural values, avoiding the source text be controlled, distorted or destroyed by target language and culture, like Anglosphere or the violent cultural values of Anglo-American culture, as well as maintaining the original appearance and features of the foreign text by the use of foreignizing translation [4,5].Thus, as Venuti's aims, the function and meaning of visibility and foreignization are for the improvement of the translator's cultural position as well as the rise of the translator's contributions to the target text.Furthermore, the maintenance of the foreignizing elements and features will not only be beneficial for the spread of foreign culture, but also for the balance and development of multicultural system.In Zhu's opinion, the two situations, whether visibility or invisibility, are both the translator's subjectivity in essence [6].He points out that the identity of the translator is different in the following two cases: in author-source language centralism, the translator is subordinate to the foreign author, who is simply as an "invisible", a "servant", as well as a "painter" to follow and reproduce the features in the foreign text; while in translator-target language centralism, the translator becomes a "creative traitor", a "manipulator", and even a "conqueror", visibly making modifications in the target text.Furthermore, from his point of view, there is a changing process of the translator's position and identity: from invisibility to visibility under the current trend of globalization, which specifically represents the gradual rise of the translator's subjectivity.However, he also emphasizes the necessity of the translator's work based on the respect for both source and target languages and cultures.Liu puts forward the acknowledgement as well as the degree of the translator's visibility according to his discovery of recontextualization and visibility of Louis Cha's The Deer and the Cauldron [7].In his opinion, the translator's visibility ought to be recognized as the translator's subjectivity and contributions to the translation will be recognized, which will improve the translator's position as well; however, he also notes that the translation work must be limited in the consistency of both the source and target discourse and context standards without any arbitrary adaptations or rewritings.Additionally, Zhou and Ren discuss the translator's visibility from the standpoint of the readers [8].From the selection of text genre and understanding and interpretation of the text as a reader, as well as the more consideration of realistic readerships' reading demand and accepted level as a translator, adopting different translation strategies according to different readerships, these three aspects all show the reflection of not only the translator's visibility, but also the objective existence of the translator's subjectivity in a translation work.
According to the study of Lu Xun's personal style in his translations, Li proposes another view that the translator would still show his visibility intentionally or not in the target text even if he has always kept invisible before [9].Additionally, from their research on Ren Rongrong's children literature translation works, Wang and Quan uncover a phenomenon that the translator's visibility can be subdivided into two cases: active visibility and passive visibility [10].In the first condition, mainly affected by ideology and mainstream poetry, the selected texts' sources and themes and translation approaches must be consistent with the social and political values; while in the second condition, Ren can more freely choose the texts and strategies under the influence of her own individual views.She is able to "manipulate" the selection of text genre and applies particular translation procedures for the consideration of specific readers, namely, the children.Apart from that, Li observe the translator's visibility and invisibility in the Chinese version of Graham Greene's The Tenth Man from the standpoint of characterization [11].According to their interpretation, the image of the character is reflected by the descriptions of vocabulary, phrase, and sentence from the analysis of these three aspects they find that in the three dimensions, whether vocabulary, phrase or sentence, the translator chooses to flexibly become visible or invisible depending on different context or discourse instead of staying in one status throughout the whole text.Moreover, they two also explore the translator's visibility of Ken Liu in the Chinese version of Hao Jingfang's Folding Beijing from the viewpoint of culture-loaded words [12].From their findings, Ken Liu's invisibility is shown in the translations of chengyu, sizige, idioms and social dialects; whereas his visibility is revealed on the translations of delicacy and dish names, rhetoric, and Chinese appellations, which, according to their explanations, will be beneficial not only for maintenance of the source text's content as well as structure, but also for the target readers' understanding to the foreignizing elements.

Research Gap
In view of the aforementioned previous studies, it can be noted that although there exists quite number of research on translator's visibility and invisibility from a variety of perspectives, the methodology still remains on the stage of traditional way.The traditional research methods, such as textual analysis, comparative analysis, to name but two, can acquire the expected results based on an established theoretical framework and several case studies of bilingual comparison undoubtfully.This kind of investigation, nevertheless, mostly originates from the researchers' individual judgement as well as deduction.Moreover, since such qualitative analysis is conducted by researchers themselves from the selection of some representative examples as case studies, it is inadequate for the size of sample in such studies as well.In this respect, the application of the corpus-based approach could fill the current gaps in the existing research.To be specific, the quantitative analysis with empirical samples is adopted in this kind of research.According to the statistics of an enormous number of data in the source and target texts in self-built corpus analysis models, the results obtained from data analysis would be more objective and credible than that from traditional qualitative analysis.
In addition to the gap on methodology, there lacks typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige) as the research object in the studies on translator's visibility and invisibility.Although the research on chengyu and sizige was mentioned and investigated by Li, the two types of Chinese vocabulary are simply one of the research aspects of the studies on culture loaded words rather than the concentration and core research object [12].Since the current studies on translator's visibility and invisibility can be observed from the perspective of lexis, it is reasonable that the field of research on translator's visibility and invisibility can be uncovered from typical four-character Chinese idioms as well.
Apart from that, there is a few numbers of studies on the chosen material for the current study -Brave New World.By contrast, literatures in the same genre -Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Weto name but three, were previously studied by different researchers from different research viewpoints.This dystopia novel is somehow rarely selected as the material for research.

Significance and Goals
In view of the above research gaps, the author makes an attempt to combine the two fields of corpus linguistics and translator's visibility and invisibility in literary translations in his current study, for the sake of providing a new methodology for the studies of translator's visibility and invisibility.
This article aims to probe into the manifestations of translator's visibility and invisibility from the employments of chengyu and sizige in Chinese translations by means of the corpus-based approach.The author launches a target text-oriented research with the parallel corpus model in his research, in the hope of finding out the reflections of translator's visibility and invisibility in the translations of the above two kinds of typical Chinese words.In addition, the current study also simultaneously aims at provides a new viewpointtypical four-character Chinese idiomsfor the research on not only the field of corpus-based studies of literary translation, but also the field of translator's visibility and invisibility on the dimension of lexical use.

Research Questions
There are two research questions proposed for this study: (1) How the translators manifest their visibility or invisibility in accordance with the use of typical four-character Chinese idioms?
(2) What motivations drive the two translators to show their visibility or invisibility in the Chinese translations?
The current study will conduct its investigation around the above-mentioned two questions.

The Research Perspective
As mentioned before, since there have been corpus-based studies of lexis as well as translators in target texts by previous researchers, translator's visibility and invisibility has been researched from lexis, and typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige) belongs to Chinese lexis, and translator's visibility and invisibility belongs to one of the translator's personal and featural manifestation in target texts, which is in the range of the research on translators as well, the above illustrations thus provide the feasibility and reasonability for the current research.In this respect, this article will explore the two translators' visibility or invisibility from the perspective of Chinese culture-specific terms, namely, typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige).

The Chosen Material
As introduced above, the original fiction Brave New World and its corresponding two Chinese versions respectively translated by Sun Fali, published by Yilin Press in 2022, and Chen Chao, published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2019, are selected as the research material for the current study [13][14][15].

Theoretical Framework
Since chengyu and sizige are two types of Chinese culture-specific words, the translation approaches for culture-specific terms proposed by Aixela is adopted in this research as one of the theoretical frameworks for the sake of answering Question 1 [16].Since Venuti presents two strategiesdomestication and foreignizationfor the exploration of the translator's visibility and invisibility, these two strategies are applied here and combined with the aforementioned approaches for a part of the theoretical framework [2].The specific classification of such translation approaches and strategies are demonstrated as Table 1.The theory of translation aesthetics and the statements about translator's visibility and invisibility in China put forward by Chang are employed as another theoretical framework in order to solve Question 2 [17].
The studies on translation aesthetics has been decades of years in China and western academia.Tytler, who might be the pioneer to introduce this concept into the field of translation studies, puts forward three essential factors for an outstanding translation: maintenance of all advantages in the original, maintenance of all views in the original, as well as manifestation of all aesthetics in the original.Chew and Stead firstly conduct a systematic research on translation aesthetics, establishing the status of the studies on this dimension and simultaneously opening up a research perspective for translation studies [18,19].The field of research on aesthetics in translations is popular in China as well.Different views on translation aesthetics proposed by different modern and contemporary translators and scholars, such as Yan Fu's principles of Faithfulness, Comprehensiveness, and Elegance, Qian Zhongshu's Hua Jing Shuo, Shen Si Shuo presented by Fu Lei, San Mei Lun put forward by Xu Yuanchong (Beauty of Pronunciation, Beauty of Connotation, as well as Beauty of Form), to name but four, all bring deep influences on Chinese translation studies of aesthetics [20,21].Moreover, from Liu's perspective, source and target languages readers belong to aesthetic objectivity while translators are aesthetic subjectivity, both of which influence mutually and jointly establish translation aesthetics [22].As long as the translator make full use of his subjectivity, putting himself into the context of source text and sincerely perceiving the original writer's intension and state of mind, the translation aesthetic reproduction can be realized.He further emphasizes that cultural communication is a significant position under globalization background [22].Translation aesthetics would generate wide and deep influences if there is a mutual integration between Chinese classical aesthetics and western aesthetics.
Opposite to Venuti's viewpoints of the translator's invisibility, Chang illustrates that, it is generally believed in Chinese culture that faithfulness and fluency are mutually exclusive [17].Since the mainstream idea in Chinese traditional translation studies is faithfulness, some special parts of the target text's language and style can be viewed as an essential and normal situation.The foreignizing way is feasible to some extent as these are the evidence of the translator's invisibility and concealing voice, for the delivery of the original writer's true ideas.On the contrary, if the translation reads too fluently like the original, the Chinese readers will suspect that there are many modifications to it, the translator is visible, showing his own voice.In this respect, particularly in Chinese society, the more dysfluent the translated text, the more invisible the translator; contrarily, with more fluent comes more visible.The domesticating translated work, from the target readerships' point of view, is not as faithful as those maintaining foreignizing elements.A faithful translation represents its sufficiency without deletion or adaptation.He further interprets that despite Chinese people prefers faithfulness and foreignizing translation, in other words, those translated texts with too much adequacy, like Lu Xun's translations with excessive literal translation, cannot become classics, in other words, "no one would like to spend time reading them" because of the obscure and elusive languages; whereas those works that the translators use domesticating translation, paying attention to their acceptability, such as Yan Fu, Lin Shu, Fu Lei, etc. "can be saved by the society and become a part of the cultural heritages" [23].In view of this, it can be concluded that the reading expectations of the Chinese readers is contradictory and complicated: they want the translations to be faithful, but meanwhile the language is expected to be fluent and acceptable to understand.This expectation is quite different to that of British and American readerships.

The Compilation of Parallel Corpus
A self-compiled parallel corpus is created in Sketch Engine for the sake of the identification as well as statistics of extracted data in the target texts and further discover the reflections of the translators' visibility and invisibility in Chinese translations.A parallel corpus named English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Brave New World (ECPCBNW) with four sub-corpora is self-compiled by Sketch Engine.In particular, the three sub-corpora include one English sub-corpus, which is named as Source Text of Brave New World (STBNW), and two Chinese sub-corpora, containing Sun Fali's Chinese Translation (SFCT) as well as Chen Chao's Chinese Translation (CCCT).This original novel and its two Chinese versions are scanned into PDF version first, and then converted into Word formats by OCR websites.After this step, the manual proofreading is conducted for these three electronic files.The annotation of translation approaches for each chengyu and sizige and their back translations are adopted in the two Chinese versions.After the alignment of the source and target texts at the sentence level in computer-aided translation tool Memsource, the latest electronic files exported from Memsource are imported into the respective corpus in Sketch Engine for data analysis.

Result
According to the identification as well as statistics of all the annotated typical four-character Chinese idioms by Sketch Engine, the number of chengyu and sizige are shown in the Table 2.In accordance with the calculation of each translation approach employed in each chengyu and sizige by self-built parallel corpus analysis models, the circumstances of the amount of each translation approach application and the corresponding percentages are demonstrated as Table 3 and  4.
Table 3 The Number of Each Translation Approach used in Two Chinese Versions Table 4 The Corresponding Proportion of Each Translation Approach applied for Chengyu and Sizige It can be found in general from the above two figures that the total number of translation approaches used in Sun's translation is much higher than that in Chen's version, which is 306 and 213 respectively.There is also a remarkable difference between the amount of foreignization and domestication in the two sub-corpora.The entire number of the two strategies in SFCT are both far above that in CCCT, which is separately 102 and 69 on foreignization, as well as separately 204 and 144 on domestication.In the sub-corpus SFCT, the whole number of domestication strategy (including five methods) is twice as many as foreignization strategy (containing six methods), which is separately 204 and 102.Moreover, the most employed translation approach by Sun is Naturalization with 154.There is simply one methodlinguisticsused in foreignization strategy, the number of which is the second highest with 102.Similarly, there is a significant difference between foreignization and domestication strategies in CCCT as well.The whole amount of domestication is also far above that of foreignization, which is respectively 69 and 144.Similar with the aforesaid sub-corpus, naturalization is the approach applied the most by Chen  Correspondingly, the ratio of linguistics application in SFCT is a bit higher than that in CCCT, with 33.33% and 32.39% separately.However, on the contrary, although the number of naturalization in SFCT is higher than that in CCCT, its corresponding percentage is lower than that in CCCT, which is respectively 50.33% and 54.46%.It is similar that the total percentage of domestication in SFCT with 66.67% is a bit lower than that in CCCT with 67.61%.It can be concluded and noted here that different to the whole number of approaches and strategies in Table 3, there is no notable difference on the dimension of entire proportion in Table 4.
Since the two translators are from China, whose target readers are the public in PRC, it can be concluded on the basis of Chang's opinion that domestication strategy and the corresponding approaches in it are used much more than foreignization strategy and the relevant methods by the two Chinese translators in their Chinese translations, which specifically means that typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige) are applied by domestication strategy as well as its particular methods in the two target texts.With the higher amount of domestication strategy and relevant approaches as well as the higher corresponding proportions, the two translators both reflect a visible status in their Chinese versions of the novel Brave New World.Furthermore, although Chen Chao's domestication percentage is a bit more dominant than that of Sun Fali, the whole number of domestication by Sun is still in a dominant position, in other words, Sun is thus more visible compared with Chen on the aspect of chengyu and sizige manifestations in the text.

Discussion
The two translators' visibility will be investigated in this part from the perspectives of translation aesthetics, Chang's viewpoint on visibility and invisibility, as well as the translators' personal habitus and choice during their literary translation.
As a type of unique-form Chinese classical lexis produced by Chinese classic language, typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige) is one of the significant parts of Chinese lexis, which own the four characteristics of concise language, tight structure, laconic pronunciation, as well as plentiful connotation, reflecting the profound and far-reaching Chinese linguistic cultures [24].Since a large number of employments of chengyu and sizige exist on not only daily life, but also important occasions by Chinese public, they are famous for another good reputation named as "living fossil of Chinese classic language" as well [25].
Due to its linguistic aesthetics as well as significance in Chinese language, typical four-character Chinese idioms are popular to be used in Chinese translations by knowledgeable Chinese translators.Compared with modern Chinese language, the advantages of chengyu and sizige applications in translations can bring a more concise, fluent and elegant Chinese language, a more succinct lexis choice, as well as a more precise and clear ideograph effect.On the other hand, the pronunciation of typical four-character Chinese idioms can give the Chinese readers a more catchy Chinese lexical rhythm during their reading, which brings them a good reading experience as well.Moreover, the expression by such specific classical Chinese lexis is more consistent with the way of authentic Chinese.In general, the use of such typical four-character Chinese idioms also complies with aforementioned Xu's San Mei Lun [21].
The two translators' choice of numerously employing chengyu and sizige is out of the consideration of giving the linguistic aesthetics to their works as well as the achievement of readability and recognition from their target readers.In particular, the readers generally pay most of their attention to the textual content and linguistic expressions rather than the circumstances of translators.As an intermediary or a "person behind the scenes", it is difficult for common readers to notice the translator's effort on Chinese translation.Contrarily, the readers mainly put their concentration on the translations' quality.In this respect, the two translators choose to show their visibility in their translations by means of enormous typical four-character Chinese idioms adoption for the sake of leaving the lasting impressions of their lexical uses to readers and meanwhile making them impress their contributions on the Chinese translation of this renowned British dystopian novel.
As for the phenomenon that the number of chengyu and sizige applied by Sun Fali is more than that by Chen Chao, it is in relation to their personal linguistic preferences.To be specific, as a famous translator in the previous generation, Sun was educated by classical and early modern Chinese in the 20 th century's China.This type of education gives Sun a special feeling and skillful use for classical Chinese language, including typical four-character Chinese idioms.Under his educational influence, Sun prefers to naturally adopt lots of chengyu and sizige in his Chinese versions during the literary translation process in order to a more authentic, fluent and elegant linguistic effect in the translation, which is also a way of manifesting individual ability of Chinese lexical employment, showing personal translator's style on lexis, as well as impressing readers the target text and the translator.By contrast, Chen's language is relatively more modern and local, the expression way of whom is more in line with that by contemporary public in the Chinese society nowadays.Since there is relatively less classical Chinese in modern Chinese language, there is less adoption of this type of culture-specific Chinese vocabulary in Chen's text instead of plenty of modern Chinese.As a matter of fact, this is a way that getting the acceptance and readability for his translated work from the modern Chinese readers as well.
According to aforesaid Chang's point of view, although quite number of typical four-character Chinese idioms are applied by Sun and Chen, the behavior of whom, is unfaithful to their Chinese readers, the relevant meanings and connotations conveyed by these culture-loaded words in the Chinese context are in fact accurate.Therefore, the applications of chengyu and sizige achieve the readable effect, which, compared with those a bit unfaithfulness, would be more recognized and tolerable for readers.

Conclusion
This article chooses the original novel Brave New World and its two Chinese versions translated respectively by Sun Fali and Chen Chao as the research materials, to make an attempt to explore the two translators' status of visibility or invisibility in their target texts from the use of typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige) by means of the corpus-based approach.According to the identification and statistics of the annotated chengyu and sizige as well as their corresponding English words or phrases in the self-built parallel corpus in Sketch Engine, it can be concluded that the two translators prefer domestication strategy on typical four-character Chinese idioms in their works, which reflect their visibility in the Chinese translations.Next, the author further qualitatively analyzes the motivations of the two translators' visible status on the basis of translation aesthetics, Chang's theoretical opinion and their individual linguistic preferences.
From the current study, the author opens up a new methodology and new prospective, namely, corpus-based approach and typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige) for the field of translation studies, especially the research on translator's visibility and invisibility, for the sake of the promotion of the two disciplines' combination: translation studies and corpus linguistics.

Table 1
The Translation Strategies and Approaches for Culture-specific Items

Table 2
The Entire Quantity of Typical Four-character Chinese Idioms in Two Chinese Translations

Foreignization Total Proportion Sub-corpora Repi
with 116 and ti ti on Orthographi c Li ngui sti c Extratextual Intratextual Total Proportion Synonymy Li mi ted Absol ute Natural i zati on Del eti on Autonomous Total Proportion linguistic is the second most as well as the only method employed in foreignization strategy with 69.Apart from that, the applications of synonym with 22 and deletion with 15 in SFCT are more than those in CCCT with 1 and 10; on the contrary, the employments of limited with 6 and absolute with 7 in SFCT are less than those in CCCT with 9 and 8.