A Functional Equivalence Perspective To The Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Emily Dickinson’s Poems

Poetry, as a necessary genre, plays an important role in literary history. From ancient time, literature has been regarded as the very essence of language, while poetry is the cream of literature. From this aspect, the significance of poetry translation and translation study is not hard to find. As far as poets are concerned, many famous poets such as Whitman, Frost, Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson spring to our mind. Among them, Dickinson is the one that cannot escape the spotlight and whose poems enjoy the most analyses and receive the most criticism all over the world. However, the situation is different in China, where translations of her poems are relatively few, let alone the translation study. Therefore study on the translation of her poems and getting proper translation strategies are necessary for the translations of her poems. Studies on the Chinese translations of her poems are also significant for Chinese readers to get a better comprehension.Based on Nida’s functional equivalence, this thesis conducts a contrastive study on Jiang Feng’s and Pu Long’s translation versions on the phonetic level, lexical level, and syntactic level, respectively. Profound comparisons are made between the two translations. Translation strategies applied are to be found.Research findings in this thesis suggest that both similarities and differences can be found in the translator’s translations and functional equivalence is represented on different levels. On the phonetic level, in order to get the rendering of words precisely, Jiang Feng lays less emphasis on rhyme, while Pu Long maintains the original rhyme scheme as much as possible with some neglect of detailed words application. On lexical level, Jiang Feng does a good job on semantic translation, but Pu Long’s translation is preferred when context is concerned. On syntactic level, Jiang Feng maintains the original syntactic characteristics and realizes the functional equivalence without obscurity and ambiguity, while in Pu Long’s version, the sentences are strange and scarcely used in Chinese poems, and great insufficiency occurs in Pu Long’s translation in this aspect.This study tries to conduct a comprehensive contrast of the two translator’s translations and their translation strategies, hoping to provide some reference for Chinese readers to appreciate Dickinson’s poems and make contributions for translating English poems into Chinese by studying the translation strategies.