| As a precious cultural heritage left by the ancients,the primer classics are the direct carrier of children’s enlightenment learning on literacy,rhythm and grammar,as well as a significant part of Chinese traditional culture.Most primer classics are short and concise in sentence pattern,harmonious and beautiful in phonology,and easy to read.It is suitable for children to learn chanting and meet the characteristics of children’s acceptance.As a kind of primer classics,Three Hundred Tang Poems is a classic work for children to learn sound and rhymes and feel the beauty of Chinese language.Therefore,it has long been prevalent for a long time and has been widely read.However,at present,most translation studies of primer classics focus on the purely qualitative analysis of text,lacking the support of quantitative data,and ignore the research on the sound level.Based on the present situation,this study selected Three Hundred Tang Poems and its four English translation(Xu Yuanchong,Wang Yushu,Payne,Witter Bynner & Kiang Kang-Hu)as the research object.Based on the theory of prosodic phonology and by means of a corpus-driven methodology,a systematically contrastive study between the original text and four English versions is conducted from the perspective of rhythmic characteristics of Three Hundred Tang Poems to explore the adaptation degree of four English translations with the original text,looking for the suitable translation norms for primer classics.Based on Three Hundred Tang Poems and its four English translations,this paper establishes a speech corpus and a text corpus.The research parameters at the sound level include duration and pitch,and that at the text level is end rhyme sonority.In terms of speech corpus,texts can be converted into sounds by software Interphonic 5.0.Pitch and duration data can be extracted by software Praat.In terms of text corpus,the phonetic symbols of end-rhymed words are marked according to the International Phonetic Alphabet Table,and then the end rhyme sonority of the original text and four translations are quantitatively calculated and compared.Finally,according to the sound and rhyme characteristics of primer classics,some translation norms for primer classics are concluded.The results and findings of this study are summarized below:After an analysis of duration,it is found that Witter Bynner’s version is the shortest which reaches 213.39 s and it is the closest to the original text.It conforms to the characteristics of primer classics,including concise sentence patterns and easy to chant.Through text analysis,it is found that the shortest translation duration of Bynner’s version is due to the omission of some non-core elements and the simple grammatical structures.Other translations have more complete grammatical components and pay attention to the translation of deep meaning,resulting in a longer text duration,which is not conducive to chant for children.Therefore,in terms of duration,Bynner’s translation is more consistent with the concise feature of primer classics.Through the analysis of tone range,it is found that the average tone range gap between Wang’s translation and the original text is the smallest,which is 5.136.At the same time,the tone range trend of Wang’s translation is highly consistent with the original text for they have the same peaks and valleys.Through the waviness analysis of the upper line and the middle line,it is found that the intonation pattern of Wang’s translation is closer to that of the original text which is inclined to exclamatory tone.Exclamatory tone is more suitable for the chanting of primer classics and the emotion expression of poetry,and it can also stimulate children’s interest in chanting ancient primer classics.Through the analysis of end rhyme sonority,it is found that Wang’s translation adopts the method of even-rhymed and one-rhyme-to-the-end which is highly consistent with the original text.However,Payne and Bynner translate the original text into free verse,which lacks regularity in the use of end rhyme.After tracing the text,it is found that Wang’s version mostly chooses the sounds approximate to the original ones in both sonority value and sound effect,which to some extent reappears the literacy grace of the original,making his translation consistent and distinct in rhythm,and more suitable for children’s recitation and memory.Combining the sound and rhymes characteristics of primer classics,this study explores the translation norms of ancient Chinese primer classics by taking “Three Hundred Tang Poems” as an example,which is of great value to the translation studies of ancient Chinese primer classics and the overseas spread of Chinese culture. |
