A Prosodic Phonological Research On Translation Of Sinology Classic Qian Jia Shi

Sinology classics are the important carrier of Chinese traditional excellent culture and also the significant content of spreading Chinese culture in the world.Qian Jia Shi is one of the classics of sinology,which has a far-reaching influence.Since ancient times,there have been many English versions of Qian Jia Shi,having attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad.However,previous studies on the sinology classics,such as Qian Jia Shi mainly focus on language and culture,moral education,text analysis,translation comparisons and other aspects,while there are few studies on prosodic phonology,which is the long-lasting and stylistic characteristics of sinology classics.Therefore,this research takes the sinology classic Qian Jia Shi as the research corpus,the theory of prosodic phonology as theoretical basis,applying speech-corpus method to extract relevant acoustic parameters to analyze the adaptation of the three English versions of Qian Jia Shi to the original in its rhyme and emotion and to explore the phonological translation norm of Qian Jia Shi.In this research,20 poems of seven-character quatrain with different emotions in the Chinese classic Qian Jia Shi are selected as the source text,the English translations of Bill Porter,Guo Zhuzhang & Fu Huisheng and Xu Ming & Xu Yuanchong as the target text.Research parameters include duration,pitch,end rhyme and end sonorant.Two types of corpora,speech corpora and text corpora,are established respectively.Given the speech corpora,this research first uses the speech synthesis software Interphonic 5.0 to synthesize the Chinese and English voices of Qian Jia Shi,and then the software Praat will be used to segment the voices to extract the parameters of the duration and pitch to analyse the clauses with obvious differences.In the text corpus,we will label the phonetic symbol of the last character of each clause of each poem in the three translations to statistically analyze the end rhyme and end sonorant,aiming to explore the fitness of the three English translations of Qian Jia Shi to the original text in terms of rhyme and emotion.The researchfindings are as follows:(1)From the aspect of duration,Bill’s translation is the shortest and its average duration of each clause is the closest to the original text.The specific analysis shows that the brevity of Bill’s translation is due to the omission of partial background information.Guo and Fu’s translation takes the longest duration and has a complete grammatical structure,but the lengthiness of some content resulted in the repetition.As for the Xu & Xu? s version,the duration lies in the second place,which faithfully conveys the original content.(2)When it comes to the comparisons of the pitch tone range and waviness,it can be seen that Xu & Xu’s translation shows a high degree of similarity to the original in the tone range trend.In terms of pitch waviness,Xu & Xu’s version uses both exclamatory and imperative sentences,and the trend of the end value of the upper line and the middle line is basically consistent with that of the original.Accordingly,on the level of the pitch,Xu & Xu’s translation is more in line with the original text.(3)For the part of the end rhyme,the Xu & Xu’s version accounts for 95% of the translation;Guo & Fu’s translation takes the second place,accounting for 35%.While Bill’s translation mainly adopts the free translation strategy with free form and irregular rhyme.Through the specific text analysis,it shows that the Xu & Xu’s version is more consistent with the original text than the other two versions.(4)As far as the end sonorant is concerned,first of all,in the total number of the end sonorants of the three translations,Bill’s translation is as high as 50%;followed by the Xu & Xu’s translation,which accounts for 46.3%.The least use of the end sonorants is Guo & Fu translation.After analyzing the number of three different types of sonorants,it is found that the difficulty of pronunciation is vowels< nasals < liquids.Among the three versions,the Xu & Xu’s translation achieves a highly uniformity to the sound effect of the original text and possesses the highest readability.On the basis of the theoretical framework of prosodic phonology,this research applies the research method of speech corpus to select four important parameters of duration,pitch,end rhyme and end sonorant to explore the phonological translationnorm of sinology classic Qian Jia Shi,which is of great practical significance to the dissemination and inheritance of excellent Chinese traditional culture.