A Contrastive Study of Five English Versions of How Can I Not Missing Her Based on Functional Linguistics

With the increasingly deepening of cultural exchanges among various ethnic groups, there is a long way to tell Chinese stories and spread Chinese culture. Poetry is one of the important carriers of Chinese civilization, and poetry translation has gradually become one of the research hotspots in academia. According to the literature to date, most of the current researches analyze poetry translation critically from the literary perspective, especially regarding ancient poetry as the main research object. However, there are some research gaps such as the studies from single perspectives or with relatively subjective analysis methods. This paper attempts to make a functional comparative analysis of the five English versions of Liu Bannong's poem How Can I Not Missing Her from three aspects in systemic functional linguistics, including experiential metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction, so as to provide the translation studies with a new perspective and method.