A Corpus-Based Study Of Poetry Translation Criteria

Poetry, with a long history and fascinatingly concentrated language, has become a form of literature of high artistic value. Poetry translation has always been the most demanding task posing challenge to every translation practitioner. On poetry translation criterion, a great many experts, domestic and abroad, have raised various criteria from different perspectives, and every one thinks in his way.This research, aims to distinguish the extrinsic differences among various translated versions of one poem and to reveal the surface sources from the linguistic level, which arouses different reveries on its readers, thus find out operable and practical guidance for poetry translation practice.After a summary of poetry translation criterion development in modern and contemporary times, the present study adopts corpus-based approach, makes calculation of textual features, translation equivalence and translation similarity by computational linguistics techniques, measures and analyzes the statistics output, and attempt to explore and find out the relations between translations'exterior features and its guiding criteria in hopes of presenting a new and fresh angle to the study of poetry translation and teaching.The primary contributions made by the present research can be summarized into the following aspects: 1) this thesis does a brief diachronic survey on the poetry translation criteria proposed both at home and abroad, and finds that the studies of poetry translation criteria go through a process of solely qualitative remarks like summaries or introspections towards the integration of qualitative and quantitative approach with multi-disciplinary features; 2) this study has made tentative yet beneficial attempts to introduce corpus linguistics approach and computational linguistics techniques into poetry translation study with the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, which is really a bold exploration and a break-through; 3) based on the statistics and inductive analysis, this study preliminarily identifies such relation between the physical statistical findings and poetry translation criteria proposed by eminent translators that the criteria appear to match the figures and facts to varying degrees with high relevance, also, this proves the reliabity of the present research method.This bold attempt bridges the quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis in poetry translation criteria study and provides a fresh and tentative perspective to the poetry translation study and even translation quality evaluation as a whole.