A Corpus-based Study Of English Versions Of Chu Ci

Chu Ci is one of the two origins of Chinese poetry with enduring appeal. Translating Chu Ci into English, in the era of cultural globalization, is of significance to the wide dissemination of Chinese culture and to the interaction and communication among all the cultures in the entire world. There are many outstanding translators at home and abroad who have translated Chu Ci into English. The studies on the English translations of Chu Ci used to adopt qualitative research methodology, and the analyses tend to be subjective. This paper selects Yang Xianyi and David Hawkes's English translations of Chu Ci to establish two parallel corpora YPARA and HPARA. Analyses of the two corpora are carried out from three aspects:lexical level, syntactic level and textual level to find out whether there are characteristics of translation universals in the translation of classical Chinese lyrics into English.This study suggests that:Both HPARA and YPARA show the tendency of explicitition. HPARA is more explicit at lexical, syntactic and textual level, while HPARA shows the tendency of explicit only at syntactic level (passive voice) and textual level.Yang Xianyi's translation is more close to the original text and helps to remain the form of the original poems to introduce Chinese culture to the western world,Hawkes's translation is more explicit and readable by adding explanations and elaborations, and apt for hypotaxis, and approximate to the English writing style.