In translating English poetry into Chinese (or Chinese poetry into English) we must consider not only our choice of words and word order, but also an “equivalent” or “comparable” line length. This does not mean the English and Chinese lines need to be the same length - on the principle of character-for-syllable, syllable-for-character, character-for-syllable-segment or syllable-segment-for-character (where the “moun” of “mountain” is a syllable and the “m” and “n” of “moun” are syllable segments)--though they could be of equivalent length according to any of these standards of measure if it seems to fit the feeling and meaning in that particular case. However, there is no real need for a “regular” meter in the source language to be rendered into a regular meter in the target language. On the contrary, more natural rhythm and speech may well be achieved by an “irregular” meter in the target language-that is, by adding “padding words” or phrases. This also helps us to catch the sense of the “run-on lines” in English verse when we translate into Chinese, since formal Chinese poetry is felt to have endstopped lines.