Author(s)

Huang Jing ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, 430081, China

Corresponding Author

Huang Jing

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a parallel corpus of six English translations of "Tianwen", this study examines translators' linguistic choices and the manifestation of translator subjectivity across four dimensions: textual form, interrogative structures, modality, and affective lexis. The findings reveal that translators construct distinct images of Qu Yuan through different configurations of linguistic resources, portraying him variously as a tragic sage, historical sufferer, moral poet, cultural explorer, cultural hero, and philosophical questioner. The study argues that the image of Qu Yuan in English translations of "Tianwen" is not a straightforward reproduction of the source text but a dynamic process of construction shaped by the interplay of translator subjectivity, cultural context, and translation strategies.

KEYWORDS

English Translations of "Tianwen"; Image of Qu Yuan; Corpus-Based Translation Studies; Translator Subjectivity

CITE THIS PAPER

Huang Jing. Qu Yuan's Image Construction in English Translations of "Tianwen": A Corpus-Based Study. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2026). Vol. 9, No. 2, 21-34. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2026.090204.

REFERENCES

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