Speech-corpus Based Study On Translation Of Prosodic Features In Li Sao

The translation and research of Chinese classics in the new period is of great significance to the promotion of the transmission and influence of Chinese culture.Li Sao,the Chinese first romantic poetry,is composed of five,six,seven,eight,nine or ten words in a line.This kind of changeable sentence structure makes its prosody more flexible and its emotion expressed more abundant,which creates the “Sao style”form in the history of Chinese literature and has a profound influence on the later generations and the development of Chinese literature.Therefore,this research selects Li Sao and its three English translations as the speech corpus to explore Li Sao’s translation norms in prosody.Previous studies on the translation of Li Sao by researchers have achieved successful results,which have certain reference value for future study,but there are still some limitations.The previous research mainly focuses on comparative studies on translation of Li Sao,studies on translation strategies of Li Sao,studies on cultural dissemination of Li Sao and so on,which focuses on traditional text analysis that may lead to the subjectivity of research results to some extent.The lack of quantitative research data on the perspective of phonology,previous studies affect the research on the characteristics of poets’ prosody to some extent.Therefore,based on the theoretical framework of prosody in phonology,this research selects Li Sao and its three English translations of Yang Xianyi,David Hawkes,and Xu Yuanchong as the speech corpus.In the speech corpus,the speech synthesis software Interphonic5.0 and the speech synthesis software Praat are used for further speech synthesis and acoustic processing to analyze the duration and pitch.In the text corpus,according to the prosodic features of the special function word in the middle line and at the end of lines in Li Sao,the differences between the three English translations and the Chinese original text at pause are analyzed.In this way,the prosody features,emotional expression and translation norms of “Sao style” poetry are explored.The results of this study are as follows.(1)In terms of duration,from the perspective of the duration of the whole poem,Yang Xianyi’s translation is the closest to the Chinese original text;Xu Yuanchong’s translation is also more consistent;Hawkes’ s translation is almost twice that of the Chinese original text.From the perspective of the duration of each sentence,Hawkes’ s translation is quite different.The main reason is that Hawkes’ s translation focuses on the literal translation of word-to-character in translation strategy.Xu Yuanchong’s translation is the most similar to Li Sao and the more prosodic translation is presented by the heroic couplet.(2)In terms of pitch,from the analysis of tone range,Hawkes’ s translation is the richest in emotion,which is closest to the emotional richness of Li Sao.But in terms of the emotional richness of specific sentence,Xu Yuanchong’s translation is more in line with Li Sao.From the perspective of pitch waviness,Xu Yuanchong’s translation can convey the emotion and sound characteristics to a greater extent,and can help readers to be more faithful to the context in which the poet expresses emotion through the poem.(3)In terms of pause,whether the function word in the middle of line or at the end of line,Xu Yuanchong’s translation shows the unique characteristic of Li Sao in pause.In short,combined with the theoretical framework of prosody in phonology,this research is based on the method of speech corpus to explore the translation of Li Sao from three aspects: duration,pitch and pause,which are of great value for promoting the translation study of prosody in Li Sao and the cultural dissemination of Li Sao.