Computational Translation Features of Chinese Translation of Emily Dickinson's Poetry: A Comparison of Kang Yanbin's and Wang Jinhua's Translations

Abstract

Up to now, Chinese scholars have made great achievements in study of Emily Dickinson's poetry, but studies of Chinese translation of her poetry, which is an important part of Emily Dickinson's studies and is necessary and feasible as well, are far from enough. By using python programming language to write program code for word segmentation and part of speech tagging, and with the help of authoritative Chinese Thesaurus, big data statistics and analysis on formal and vocabulary features of Kang Yanbin's and Wang Jinhua's Chinese translation of Emily Dickinson's poems are made, and translation features of the two translations are summarized, which will showcase one of the features of Chinese translation of Emily Dickinson's poetry in China. It is found that in comparison, Wang's translation is more fluent and easy to read, yet due to the too many explanatory, descriptive and connective words added in translation, as well as large difference between the original and the translation in the number of punctuation marks, especially of dashes, Wang’s translation is less concise and faithful. Kang's translation is faithful to original form, and is terse and concise, but sometimes there exists excessive conciseness which entails inadequate expression, and the retardant coherence, as well as occasionally use of rare words sometimes make Kang’s translation obscure, which hinder fluency and readability to some degree.