A Prosodic Phonological Research On English Translation Of Chinese Chanting Classic Shi Jing

Chinese classical poetry can be inherited through chanting.For the reason that Chinese classical poems have rhythm and prosody,they can naturally convey emotions when chanted.Therefore,the success of translated poems is mainly determined by the sound effects of the target language.This study selects the love poems in Feng part in Chinese classic Shi Jing,exploring the reproduction of prosody and emotion of the original poetry based on prosodic phonology and corpus-based translation study.This study employs the corpus-driven research method.With the assistance of speech synthesis software Interphonic 5.0,the speech corpora are established with source language and target language texts converted from texts to audio files.We have selected Chinese version Shi Jing annotated by Cheng Junying as source language text and three English versions translated by James Legge,Wang Rongpei and Xu Yuanchong as target language texts.Duration and pitch are chosen as two analysis parameters and the data of duration,starting pitch and ending pitch are extracted by Praat.The prosodic differences among Chinese original text and the three English versions are compared through data analysis and textual analysis.The research results show that:(1)In terms of duration,Legge's translation is the longest and Xu's translation is the shortest on average.Legge pursues to totally convey the original textual meaning and his literal translation strategy leads to longer duration.Thus,Legge version's long duration which will affect emotional expression is not appropriate for chanting.As a whole,the line duration of Xu's translation is more uniform and is in consistency with the original style.(2)In terms of pitch,this study investigates tone range and pitch waviness.The tone range variances among poems of different themes in Xu's translation are more notable than Wang's and Legge's.Xu realized that different themes represent different emotions;hence,he illustrates the different emotions through the pitch change.Xu's translation version possesses the largest average tone range while Legge's translation has the smallest average tone range.Therefore,the fluctuation of emotion is better produced in Xu's version.In regard to pitch waviness,Xu's version shares the same type of intonationpattern and sentence mood with original text.Synthesis results of duration and pitch show that Xu's version can reproduce the prosodic features in the original Chinese text on the sound level.Generally,compared with Legge's and Wang's version,Xu's version is ideal for Chinese chanting than other two versions.With prosodic phonology as the research framework,this study employs the speech-corpus-driven method to investigate prosodic features and emotion expression of Chinese classics translation.It is of great significance for translation studies and dissemination of Chinese chanting classics.