A Diachronic Analysis of the Linguistic Features of English Versions of Chinese Poems—Three Case Studies of The Book of Poetry

This paper attempts to investigate the translational features of the English versions of ancient Chinese poems from diachronic point of view by means of compiling The Book of Poetry muti-corpora which include a parallel corpus as well as a comparable corpus. The results prove the feature of extra-explicitation, but the feature of intra-explicitation is not well proved. Furthermore, the results show that the standardization and simplification features of translation are not totally available in poem translations. The reasons for that include both intralingua and extralingual factors such as the difference between the Chinese language and English language, the features of poems, the historic and cultural background and the attitude to politics and ethic of the translators.