An English-Chinese Translation Report Of Philology,Anthropology And Poetry In Arthur Waley’s Translation Of The Shijing(Chapter Two)

Shijing is the beginning of ancient Chinese poetry and the earliest compilation of poetry.In recent years,Shijing has spread in the world in more than a dozen languages which is setting off a wave of the study of Shijing and Sinology at home and abroad.The English translation of the Shijing has laid the foundation for traditional Chinese culture going out which helps the world better know China as an ancient civilization country.This translation report uses the second chapter of Dr.Lin Qingyang’s thesis Philology,Anthropology and Poetry in Arthur Waley’s translation of Shijing as the source text.Under the guidance of Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence,the translator will conduct the research in three levels.At the lexical level,it focused on the translation of technical terms,including linguistic terms and humanistic terms.Functional equivalence must be emphasized on term equivalence,information equivalence,and even stylistic equivalence.At the syntactic level,the translator analyzed the differences between the English and Chinese languages,and discussed how to get rid of the constraints on the original text during the translation of long and difficult sentences.Under the guidance of functional equivalence,literal translation,adverse translation and divide translation are used reasonably.At the textual level,the translator mainly explored the translation strategies of poetry.The biggest contribution to the functional equivalence theory is that the translation is no longer a comparison between the original language and the target language,but a comparison between the two cultural exchanges.Therefore,poetry translation requires not only faithfulness,but also the creativity of translators.