Big Data Analysis on Features of Wang Jinhua's Chinese Translation of Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Abstract

The American poetess, Emily Dickinson, whose poems have entered textbooks of Chinese university, primary and middle schools for many years, has become a well-known foreign poet for Chinese public. It is through Chinese translation that most Chinese readers come into contact with Dickinson's poems, yet study on Chinese translation of Dickinson's poetry which will help reveal characteristics of Chinese translation and thus contribute to the development of Dickinson studies and facilitate popularity of Emily Dickinson in China, is obviously insufficient at present. Based on text data of 243 translated poems in Wang Jinhua's collection of Chinese translation,Selected Dickinson’s Poems, and their original poems, programming approach is adopted to make statistics of vocabulary, part of speech, stanza and line, and punctuation of the original and the translated texts, and translation features of Wang's translation is revealed by contrastive analysis. It is found that vocabulary in Wang’s translation is less abundant than the original. Weights of nouns plus verbs in translation and the original text are close, accounting for about 45% respectively, but nouns performance in original text is more prominent, while verbs performance in translation is more significant. There are many additions of verbs in translation, while there are not much changes to original nouns, and sometimes new nouns are added as subjects of clauses, all of which making the translation smooth and easy to understand without lacking of gracefulness. There is little difference in the number of stanzas and verse lines between the original and Wang’s translation. Original dashes and commas have been changed a lot, either by omission or conversion, yet periods undergo little changes. Translation of exclamation marks and question marks is with high faithfulness to the original.