A Study of Wang Zuoliang’s Style of Verse Translation: A Text-typology Approach to His Chinese Version of My Heart’s in the Highlands
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18063/cef.v3i5.1204Keywords:
Wang Zuoliang, Yuan Kejia, translation style, Newmark’s translation theoryAbstract
This study examines Wang Zuoliang’s style of verse translation through Peter Newmark’s text typology theory, with a specific focus on his Chinese version of Robert Burns’ My Heart’s in the Highlands in comparison with that of Yuan Kejia. As the original text belongs to the expressive type, Wang’s style is marked by musicality and readability, linguistic conciseness and refinement, poetic sensibility and cultural images. While he primarily adopts communicative translation to enhance reader engagement and emotional resonance, he also incorporates semantic translation to preserve the original formal and cultural elements. His translation maintains the same length as the source text and employs colloquial expressions and reduplicated words to achieve musicality and auditory beauty. The comparative analysis reveals that Wang’s approach balance fidelity to the source text with readability and poetic elegance in the target language, offering valuable insights for poetry translation practice and theory.
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