ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.08.014
Rendering Moosehead Lake as “You Lake”: A Corpus-based Study of Lü Bicheng’s Translator Habitus and Its Interplay with Her Translation Practice
Ke Li1,*, Ludan Xiang2
1School of International Communication, Wuhan Business University, Wuhan 430056, Hubei, China.
2School of Law and Public Administration, China Three Gorges University, Yichang 443002, Hubei, China.
*Corresponding author: Ke Li
This research was supported by the Philosophy and Social Sciences Research Project of the Department of Education of Hubei Province (Grant No. 23G017).
Published: August 26, 2026
Abstract
This article studies Lü Bicheng’s translator habitus, a core concept in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice, with the methods of corpus-based translation studies. Its object is The Light of Europe and America (1932), compiled and translated by Lü. We built the Lü Bicheng Translation Corpus by visually transcribing the 252-page scan of the 1932 Meicheng Printing Company edition: a clean full text (93,973 characters), Chinese- and Western-language sub-corpora, forty-four item files, and a sentence-aligned parallel sub-corpus of Touqiang Xing and My Fawn. At book level, the punctuated sections average 13.66 characters per sentence, and the translated items (6.46) run markedly shorter than Lü’s own essays (14.77-18.15), which points to simplification. High-frequency bigrams such as dongwu “animals” (182), baohu “protection” (104), shushi “vegetable diet” (85) and huopou “vivisection” (49) form a life-protection word cluster, and the self-coined rendering shushi (85 occurrences) far outnumbers sushi (1). In the parallel sub-corpus, addition appears in 100 percent of the eleven aligned units, omission in zero, and shifts in 72.7 percent; renderings such as You Lake, qiangsheng and chandao ethicize and Buddhistize the English hunting narrative. Lü’s life-protection habitus therefore leaves quantifiable traces at the lexical and syntactic levels, and her sustained compiling-translating practice in turn consolidates that habitus.
Keyword
Lü Bicheng; translator’s habitus; corpus-based translation studies; translation shifts; The Light of Europe and America
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Copyright
© 2026 by the author(s).
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How to cite this paper
Rendering Moosehead Lake as “You Lake”: A Corpus-based Study of Lü Bicheng’s Translator Habitus and Its Interplay with Her Translation Practice
How to cite this paper: Ke Li, Ludan Xiang. (2026) Rendering Moosehead Lake as “You Lake”: A Corpus-based Study of Lü Bicheng’s Translator Habitus and Its Interplay with Her Translation Practice. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 10(8), 945-952.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.08.014