A Corpus-based Study of Gaoxin Huang’s Poetry Translation Style

Though he himself is not a poet, Gaoxin Huang (1936-) has published a dozen of translated poetry collections. Huang has further developed the poetry translation strategy of “yidun daibu” (substituting pause for foot) on the basis of his predecessors and proposed quantitative standards of poetic meter and the “Emulation Method”. This study attempts to examine Huang’s poetry translation style with a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative study. For the study two corpora are constructed: a bilingual parallel corpus of 100 English poems with their Chinese translations and a monolingual comparable corpus of Chinese translations of 100 English poems and 280 original Chinese poems. Data on lexicon, syntax and phonology are collected from the two corpora to address the stylistic characteristics of Huang’s poetry translation at the lexical, syntactic and phonological levels. Huang’s translation employs a richer vocabulary than the original English poems, and the choice of words is more akin to the original Chinese poems. Huang does not replicate the original poem, but preserves the original poem’s harmony of structure, rhythm, and word count by substituting the Chinese pause for the English foot and making full use of the Chinese conjunctions.