Abstract: Literary tone is a composite of form and content. It is an important hallmark of an author’s creative individuality and the main way for readers to identify and experience the uniqueness of a work. This paper takes language means, sentiment, and colour tone as the main parameters for measuring literary tone. Based on the corpus, this paper quantifies the above-mentioned parameters of Lu Xun’s essays and their translations, and then compares and measures the extent to which the translations reproduce the literary tone of the original works. The study shows that Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s English translations of Lu Xun’s essays demonstrate a high level of lexical diversity and syntactic flexibility. However, due to language limitations and other factors, there are significant differences between the translations and the original texts in terms of key words, the number of satirical sentences, and the intensity of negative emotions. As a result, compared with the original texts, the cold tone of the English translations is somewhat softened and the critical edge is reduced. Since the literary tone of the translation differs from that of the original, reading the translation of Lu Xu’s essays will yield different feelings and experiences from reading the original.