A Comparative Study of the English Translations of "Chun Ye Xi Yu" From the Perspective of Register Theory

Ancient poetry is an irreplaceable component of Chinese culture and an invaluable asset in China’s cultural heritage. With the rapid development of globalization and informatization, Chinese poem is attracting more and more interests and focuses as one part of China’s cultural soft power which plays an important role on spreading traditional Chinese culture. Systemic functional linguistics mainly explores the essence, entailment, system and structure of language from the perspective of social culture, especially the relationship between context and discourse. Therefore, the paper applies the register theory to Chinese poem translations of Xu Yuanchong and Yang Xianyi of “Chun Ye Xi Yu” in order to compare two translated texts from three aspects of field, tenor, and mode, and examine the expression of the connotation of the original poem between the two translations.

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