Readers’ perceptions of Anthony Yu’s self-retranslation ofThe Journey to the West

With the aim of filling the gap in the research on real readers’ perception in stylistic research, this study adopts a mixed-method approach integrating quantitative and qualitative data analysis in order to systematically compare reader reviews on Anthony Yu’s two English translations of The Journey to the West. The comparison is divided into two steps. The first step is to winnow out representative reader comments from Amazon Books with the aid of the corpus tool ProtAnt. The other is to graphically represent the readers’ perception by annotating the reviews according to the hierarchy of the contained codes, categories, and themes using qualitative data analyzer RQDA. In addition, this research cross-references reader’s perception on the two translations with the translator’s voice, i.e., how the translator reflects on his self-retranslation.