As one of the earliest collections of Chinese poetry, the Shi Jing has a profound influence on Chinese
literature, reproducing the life of the people and society of the Zhou Dynasty in a combination of lyricism
and realism. The reduplicative words in the poems greatly enhance their artistic expression and power of
communication in terms of structure, rhythm and imagery. Therefore, the translation of reduplicative words
cannot be neglected, and the meaning of the original text and its aesthetic and emotional connotation to the
greatest extent are important and difficult for the translation. Based on Eugene A. Nida’s Functional Equivalence
theory, this paper classifies the reduplicative words into adjective reduplicative, verb reduplicative and
onomatopoeic reduplicative according to their lexical nature, and compares and analyzes the translations by
Séraphin Couvreur and Xu Yuanchong to explore the translation strategies and sort out the considerations in the
process of French translation.