A Prosodic Phonological Research On The Translation Of Daiyu’s Gexing Poems In Hong Lou Meng

As the head of Four Classics in ancient Chinese literature,Hong Lou Meng is a vital channel for Western countries to understand Chinese culture whose different translations attract the extensive attention of many translators and scholars.The uniqueness of novel art in Hong Lou Meng is that Poetry,Ci,Song,Fu run through the whole story plots which play an important role in shaping characters’ image and conveying their emotion.Therefore,poem translation can be regarded as the value guidance for measuring translations of Hong Lou Meng.Poetry is concise and rhythmic,and expresses sufficient emotion.However,various poetic styles and unique poetic language challenge translators to reproduce the original rhyme scheme and convey the original emotion a lot.This paper selects Daiyu’s three Gexing poems and three translations as research objects to explore translation norms combining with prosodic phonology.Previous scholars made sufficient studies on poem translation of Hong Lou Meng which were helpful to the later study but still had a few limitations.First,previous research material was separate and single.Second,research views mainly focused on translation linguistics,translation aesthetics,translation strategies,religion,culture,intention and so on.Finally,previous researches were mainly based on traditional qualitative methods,which may lead to the subjectivity of research results.Although,in recent years,scholars have gradually adopted corpus means for quantitative analysis with the development of computer technology,but the proportion is still low.This paper selects Daiyu’s three Gexing poems and their three translations of Yang Xianyi & Gladys,David Hawkes and Bramwell Seaton Bonsall as research objects.The speech synthesis software Interphonic5.0 and the speech corpus software Praat are used for further speech synthesis and acoustic processing analysis.Based on the theoretical framework of prosodic phonology,duration and pitch are selected as the main research parameters to explore whether three translations reproduce the original rhyme scheme and sound effect and analyze translation norms when translators reconstruct rhythm and emotion.In the progress of research,verses with large differences are also selected as cases for further analysis.The research results are summarized as follows:(1)Rhyme: All three translations adopted alliteration to reproduce the sound beauty of rhyme and emotion conveyed by some assonance and reduplicated words in original text.Various alliterations could highlight the musical beauty of poetic language./f/,/b/,/s/ were mostly used in three translations whose pronunciations reproduced the similar emotional tone as the original poetry to some extent.In addition,both the Yangs and Hawkes focused more on end rhyme than Bonsall who translated these poems into prose style without regular rhyme scheme,which was not consistent with the original rhyme features.The Yangs completely abided by the original rhyme format and applied abcb mostly,rhyming in even line which was closer to original poetry.Hawkes was influenced by Western culture,and used rhyme freely.Such rhyme scheme as aabb mostly used in his translation complied with the feature of English poetry.Hawkes’ translation had clear and regular rhythm which was basically iambic pentameter.Finally,for end sonorants and end sonority values,Hawkes even considered the acoustic effect of the original text,and his translation was the closest to the original in sonority values.Poetry language was different from other stylistic languages.Especially,Gexing was composed for singing whose harmonious rhyme format and regular rhythm helped acoustic and emotional flow.Therefore,the Yangs’ translation and Hawkes’ translation were better at reproducing rhyme characteristics and acoustic effect of the original poetry and emotional flow.(2)Duration: According to the analysis of duration,the Yangs’ translation and Hawkes’ translation were more flexible and free,which were the closest to original poems in both the whole text and the single clause.Duration affected poetry rhythm,and long duration was not conducive to reproduce poetic rhythm,nor did it conform to the characteristics of poetic language.Bonsall’s translation was extremely different from the original poem whose duration was almost twice that of the original poems,which didn’t help highlight the original rhythm.The reason was that Bonsall focused on word-to-word translation,which resulted in its long duration.Secondly,for standard deviation,duration difference between the original poems was relatively small,and each sentence of poetry was relatively stable.However,among three translations,there were some sentences with the biggest differences.The reason was that duration of Bonsall’s translation was long and Hawkes emphasized quantitative words.Therefore,the Yangs’ translation was more stable overall.(3)Pitch: according to the tone range,several verses in three translations were inconsistent with the rich degree of the original poetry’s emotion,but they were consistent as a whole.Sentences with the highest tone range in three translations were basically full of rich emotion.But among three translations,Bonsall’s translation had the richest emotion,which was also the result of his strategy of word-to-word translation.In terms of the correspondence with the original poems,two of the three verses with the highest tone range in the Yangs’ translation were almost consistent with the original poems.Judging from the waviness,three translations almost have similar tone as the original,but the first two translations were more consistent with the original poems while Bonsall’s translation was slightly different.Combining with prosodic phonology and speech-corpus-based research,we had explored Gexing poems translation in Hong Lou Meng from three aspects: rhyme scheme,duration and pitch.It was of big significance for Chinese classical poem translation study and dissemination of Chinese poetic culture.