The Translation Features of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry’s Chinese Translation Dust is the Only Secret

Abstract

Using program written in python language to conduct a statistical and comparative analysis of poetic form and vocabulary use of Emily Dickinson's poems and its Chinese translation in the poetry collection, Dust is the Only Secret, translated by Xu Chungang, to reveal features of the translation, it is found that, compared with the original, the form of translated poetry deviates obviously from the original, in which quantity of verse line is close to the original, while the stanza deviation is large. Punctuation deviations such as deviations of dash, comma and period from the original are the most prominent. The translation is slightly inferior to the original in terms of richness of nouns and delicacy and exquisiteness of image depiction with adjectives, but far advantageous in dynamic of language due to abundant use of verbs.