TITLE:
On Iconicity in English Translation of “Song of Mulan”
AUTHORS:
Yuli Liu
KEYWORDS:
Iconicity, “Song of Mulan”, English Translation, Poetry
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.13 No.2,
February
26,
2025
ABSTRACT: The book, “The Collection of Poems of Yuefu”, is the essence of the folk songs of the Han Dynasty, Wei and Jin Dynasties, and North and South Dynasties, which plays an important part in the Chinese poetry world, and shines between the pre-Qin and Tang poems and Song poems, and its creative methods have far-reaching influences on the genre structure and language art of the poems of the later generations. As one of the two peaks of China’s Yuefu poetry, the “Song of Mulan” has been translated by many Chinese and foreign translators due to its profound social and ideological significance and high artistic achievement. Taking “Song of Mulan” as an example, this article aims to deeply understand the characteristics of resemblance embedded in the poem from the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels, analyze how faithfully the translation reproduces the principle of resemblance in the original poem, and explore the linguistic choices made by the translators in order to present the forms and meanings of the original poem as well as their expressive effects, with a view to providing a different perspective for the translation of classical Chinese poems.