| Emily Dickinson is a well-known American female poet in the nineteenth century.She is regarded as the precursor of American modernistic poetry.Nowadays more and more Chinese translators and scholars take part in the translation of Dickinson’s poetry.Among them,Jiang Feng firstly published the Chinese version of selected poems of Dickinson,while Pu Long published the first complete Chinese version.The two versions play an important role in the introduction to Dickinson’s poetry,but apparently Jiang’s translation is more popular among readers.What are the features of the two translation versions? Why Jiang’s translation is more popular? The two questions are worth study.This thesis is going to compare Jiang’s and Pu’s translations to figure out their style features by using a quantitative method,and then to explore the reasons why Jiang’s translation is more popular.The research objects are Jiang’s217 translated poems in Wild Night published in 2008 and their counterparts in Pu’s The Complete Poems of Dickinson published in 2014.Based on Liu Miqing’s Stylistic Markers Theory and the formal features of poetry,the thesis makes comparisons between the styles of the two translation versions from four levels.The first chapter is a brief introduction to the background,research questions,and its significance.Chapter two makes a literature review about different translation versions of Dickinson’s poetry and about studies on these translations.Chapter three introduces the Stylistic Markers Theory and puts forward four style markers which could be quantitatively measured,including graphological markers,phonological markers,lexical markers,and grammatical markers.It also illustrates the methods and progress of the study.Chapter four compares Jiang’s and Pu’s translations from the perspective of the four style markers in a quantitative way.The statistics of graphological markers show that the alterations of stanzas,lines,and punctuation in Pu’s translation are fewer than those in Jiang’s translation,which indicates that Pu’s translation is more faithful in structure.In terms of phonological markers,Pu’s translation presents a higher rate of reproducing the rhyming effect of those quatrains(four-line stanzas)with a specific rhyme scheme.For lexical markers,there are fewer Chinesecharacters and words in Jiang’s translation,which suggests that Jiang’s translation is more concise.And to be precise,there are fewer four-character idioms,numerals,and quantifiers in Jiang’s translation.But Jiang’s translation is rich in emotion because of its higher frequency of modal particles and interjections.When it comes to grammatical markers,in Pu’s translation there are more prepositions,conjunctions,and pronouns,making the translation more mechanical,while in Jiang’s translation some function words are omitted and the translation shows the quality of parataxis.The last chapter concludes the style features of the two translation versions that Pu’s translation has a higher consistency to the original poems in graphological markers and phonological markers while Jiang’s translation is more concise on the whole.Based on their style features,this thesis goes further to explore the reasons why Jiang’s translation is more popular.It seems that the consistency between the translation and the source text in graphological markers and phonological markers means little to readers.Jiang’s translation is more popular because it is more concise and shows the quality of parataxis which satisfies the expectation of readers.At the same time,in this chapter,the limitations of the study and suggestions for further study are stated.It must be controversial to interpret the perceptual literary works by using rigid statistics,but it is a good try in translation study,especially in the comparison of the styles of translations,for it can not only verify the cognition of the translation from experiential reading but also enlighten the translators which kinds of translation would be more acceptable to readers. |
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