Translations of Cervantes' Don Quijote (1605) take pride of place among foreign literature in China. Despite the contrasts between the two cultures and the passage of four centuries the adventures and misadventures of the Castilian hero have always been popular with Chinese readers. In this book a corpus-based stylistic study is used to explore two contemporary Mandarin Chinese translations of Don Quijote: those by Yang Jiang (1978) and Liu Jingsheng (1995). Utilising a micro-structural perspective this study suggests explanations for the surprising popularity of Don Quijote in China.

Contents: - Construction of a Parallel Corpus of Don Quijote - Corpus Data Retrieval and Annotation - Phraseological Patterns in Yang's Translation - Phraseological Patterns in Liu's Translation - Use of Figurative/Archaic Idioms in the Two Translations - Quantitative Exploration of Style Variation in Liu's Translation.

The Author: Meng Ji has a Ph.D. from Imperial College London (2009) within the area of corpus-based translation studies focused on the study of phraseology in literary translations into Chinese. She is presently developing an interdisciplinary approach to corpus-based translation studies by integrating methodologies from disciplines including textual statistics, quantitative sociolinguistics and computational stylometry.