Translation Styles in Two Chinese Versions of A Bend in the River: A Corpus-Based Study through Bourdieu's Practice Theory

This study adopts a corpus-based translation studies (CTS) approach to compare Fang Bolin's and Li Yongping's Chinese translations of A Bend in the River. A bilingual one-to-two parallel corpus was constructed with sentence-level alignment; quantitative indices include STTR, lexical density, four-character idiom frequency, syntactic restructuring profiles, and strategies for culture-loaded words. Using Bourdieu's practice theory, it examines linguistic and non-linguistic features through quantitative methods, focusing on differences in lexical richness, syntactic patterns, and translation strategies. The findings show that Li Yongping’s translation demonstrates higher lexical richness (STTR = 52.76%), greater frequency of four-character idioms (0.94%), and more active syntactic restructuring. In contrast, Fang Bolin's translation relies more on the syntactic strategy of direct correspondence (80.0%) and shows a higher proportion of high-frequency words (22.11%). The stylistic differences can be attributed to the translators' different field positions, cultural capital accumulation, and translation habitus formation. As a mature writer-translator, Li Yongping occupied a central position in the translation field, possessed rich cultural capital and a strong creative habitus, and tended toward a domestication translation strategy. Fang Bolin, by contrast, as a novice translator, occupied a peripheral position in the translation field, relied on academic capital and a conservative habitus, and tended toward a foreignization translation strategy. Interpreted through the field–capital–habitus lens, these contrasts move the analysis from description to explanation and point to implications for translator training.