An Analysis of Transformation Validity of English Translation of Shijing·Guo Feng from the Perspective of Three-dimensional Transformation in Eco-Translatology

This essay conducts an analysis of English translation versions of Shijing·Guo Feng by James Legge and Wang Rongpei from the following three dimensions: linguistic, culture and communication on the basis of the three-dimensional transformation principle in Eco-Translatology, intending to probe into the differences of transformation validity between the two versions at multidimensional levels with the application of corpus processing software: WordSmith, AntConc, TreeTagger, etc. The results are as follows: for linguistic dimension, Wang Rongpei's translation surpasses James Legge's in transformation validity for being closer to the original poems in STTR, lexical density, syntactical features, the usage of logical connectives, the number of chapters and lines, rhythm pattern, etc. For cultural dimension, James Legge's translation enjoys a higher level of transformation validity by retaining and elucidating most of the animal and plant images in poems. For communicative dimension, James Legge's version is higher in transformation validity for being in line with target readers' cognitive domain, grammatical composition and reading habits.