A Corpus-based Stylistic Study On The Translation Of Hanshan Poems By Arthur Walley And Gary Snyder

The legend of Hanshan poems has deeply impressed Chinese poetic history.The collection of Hanshan poems has gained popularity in foreign countries regardless of domestic anonymity,occupying a higher position in foreign culture on account of its huge influence on Japanese Haiku and American Beat Generation.As we all know,it is difficult to recreate the beauty of original work in the process of translation.So marvelous it is that the translated versions of Hanshan poems achieved high level of laurel in the field of literature.Over the past few decades,researches on Hanshan poems focus on the analysis of this wondrous cultural phenomenon,contributing to gradual emergence of considerable qualitative studies from the perspective of literature,intercultural communication and medio-translatology.Moreover,the rapid revolution of computer system paves the new approach that the electronic corpus could be processed and analyzed with software to investigate the stylistic features of poems.In order to analyze the stylistic features of Hanshan poems,corpora-construction in this research will be realized with the assistance of the first version by Arthur Walley and the most influential version by Gary Snyder.The attempt to combine corpus stylistics with poetry translation study will be realized in this thesis.On the basis of corpus-based approach and two English versions of Hanshan poems,the study aims to offer a descriptive analysis of stylistic features of two corpora with corpus tools,such as Antconc,MyZiCifreq,Microsoft:Office,Interphonic5.0 and Praat.After sorting out the data from these tools,analysis from the perspective of lexis,text,and sound will be demonstrated sequentially.The results of research are listed as follows:1.At the lexical level:(1)The length of Walley's version is much longer than that of Snyder,while the standardized type/token ratio turns out the opposite,indicating that the translation vocabulary of Walley is smaller than that of Snyder.(2)The high frequency words demonstrate the topic-selecting tendency of two translators:Snyder is inclined to choose poems about poet:Hanshan and place:cold mountain while Walley's choice seems to reflect his life experience and age.(3)Two translators adopt literal translation skills to deal with comic concepts.Snyder's version contains several Zen words to show his understanding of Zen spirit.2.At the textual level:First personal references are widely used in both Walley's and Snyder's^version.Meanwhile,neither Walley nor Snyder relatively prefers third personal references in their translation.The second personal references are the least favored in these two versions.What's more,Walley gives preference to personal pronouns and the number of pronouns he used is twice that of Snyder.In term of conjunction,the data shows that Snyder is inclined to use less conjunctions than Walley.And for punctuation,we can conclude that(1)Snyder is more likely to employ colon,a kind of punctuation frequently used in Haiku translation,in his translation;(2)Walley tends to use semicolon to segment the sentences instead of comma;(3)Snyder is inclined to adopt single quotes such as:'s,don't,haven't,can't.By means of single quotes,the number of words and syllables in Snyder's translation will shrink.With regard to average line length,Walley adopted the method of line by line transition in order to keep the form of original poems.It is also worth mentioning that the average line length of Snyder's version is shorter than that of Walley.3.At the phonological level,(1)The tendency to maintain the form of original work makes Walley use repetition of the same place in his translation,while Snyder adopted various methods to deal with Chinese reduplication such as alliteration,consonance,synonym and repetition.(2)By using Praat,parameters such as duration,pitch and intensity of sound can be shown clearly.Chinese version tends to have short duration and stable pitch and intensity.More specifically,the duration of English version is about triple of Chinese version.And Walley's version always has a longer duration than that of Snyder.In terms of pitch,there are some singular values in tone range and intensity of Snyder's version;however,the pitch range and intensity variation of Walley's version were more stable,which illustrates Snyder is bolder and more radical in his translation.To summarize,Snyder's language was influenced by Haiku while Walley's translation was more faithful to the original.The influence from Haiku on Snyder is reflected in five aspects:(1)Zen spirits in his poems(2)preference to omit personal pronouns to be objectively;(3)less but accurate conjunctions;(4)the use of colon in his translation to make conversations with nature;(5)short,simple but concise sentence as well as Haiku.The faithfulness of Walley's translation is reflected in the completely translated information;therefore,long line poems take shape.