Chinese Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: A Data-based Comparison of Jiang Feng’s and Pu Long’s Translated Versions

Abstract

Jiang Feng's and Pu Long's Chinese translations of Poems of Emily Dickinson, a pioneer of Modern English Poetry, are very important for Emily Dickinson studies in China. From each of the translated Version, 217 translated poems are chosen respectively as research objects for a big-data analysis to reveal translation characteristics of the two translated versions. Based on corpora of 217 source texts, Jiang Feng's translated texts and Pu Long's translated texts, and by use of corpus analysis software, Antconc. 3.4.4, and Chinese-word segmentation system,  ICTCLAS, a big-data comparative analysis focusing on poetic form and vocabulary is carried out to find out characteristics of the two translated versions especially in stanza-division, line-division, and punctuation translation, as well as in diction. The result shows that in poetic form, whether it is division of stanzas or lines, or arrangement of punctuation, Pu’s translation is more faithful than Jiang's to source texts; and in diction, Jiang’s translation is more concise and flexible, while Pu’s translation is more smooth and fluent and has the overall trend of adhering rigorously to source texts.