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A Tentative Discussion on the Translation of Robert Burns’ Farewell Discourse



Author(s)

ZHOU Yi-nuo, LI Zheng-shuan

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2025.03.008

School of Foreign Studies, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China

From the perspective of literary stylistics, this paper explores the discourse styles and Chinese translation characteristics of Robert Burns’ farewell poems. Burns’ farewell poems mostly appear in three types: love poems, patriotic poems and animal poems, corresponding to the explicit, implicit and personified discourse styles. In the love farewell poems, the explicit ones express emotions directly by using words such as “farewell”; the implicit ones express emotions indirectly through the female perspective and the repetition of phrases. In the patriotic farewell poems, “farewell” and its phrases are used to express patriotism and the sentiment of separation. In the animal farewell poems, personification is used to endow animals with human nature, and images are used to imply death. When translating, the translator skillfully uses auxiliary words and adopts multiple translations for one word in dealing with explicit discourse; flexibly handles person and repeated phrases in implicit discourse; and conducts part-of-speech conversion and reproduces the rhythm in personified discourse. This study aims to explore how to understand the source text equivalently and express the ideas and styles of the source text appropriately, so as to achieve the standards of accuracy and vividness.

Robert Burns, farewell poems, Chinese translation research

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, March 2025, Vol. 15, No. 3, 163-177