A Corpus-Assisted Study On The English Translations Of Tang Poetry

Tang Poetry is a precious gem of Chinese culture. It is the zenith of classical Chinese poetry. Translating Tang Poetry into English, in the era of cultural globalization, is crucial to the wide spreading of Chinese culture and to the interaction and communication among all the cultures in the whole world. There are many outstanding translators at home and abroad who have translated Tang Poetry into English. The studies on the English translations of Tang Poetry used to adopt qualitative research methodology, and the analyses tend to be subjective. This paper selects Xu Yuanzhong and Witter Bynner's English translations of Tang Poetry to establish two parallel corpora XYZPARA and BYNPARA. To date, few parallel corpus-assisted studies on the English translations of Tang Poetry are carried out. This paper tries to avail itself of theories of translation studies and CTS to make a detailed description and analysis of the two English versions.This study suggests that:(1) Generally speaking, both English versions of Tang Poetry show the tendency of explicitation and simplification. Xu's translation is more explicit on lexical level and syntactic level, while Bynner's translation is more explicit on textual level. The tendency of simplification is found in Bynner's translation, but not in Xu's translation.(2) Xu's translation approximates to the original in terms of the language adopted. In contrast, Bynner depends more heavily on hypotaxis, which is a typical characteristic of the English language.(3) Xu Yuanzhong's translation is permeated with the classical Chinese verve, while Bynner's translation is more natural and westernized.