Comparative Study Of Translations Of The Peony Pavilion

This thesis is a comparative study of the three translations of The Peony Pavilion by Ciril Birch, Wang Rongpei and Zhang Guangqian. Through examining the selected examples, it analyses the general styles of the translations, and different translation methods towards individual characters and words, syntactic features, rhyming effect, puns, alternative terms as well as allusions. It provides a detailed discussion of the reasons behind the differences, including the influence of translators' principles and their cultural identities. In an effort to move beyond literal and free translation, it refers to "alienating" and "naturalizing" as two major translation strategies. Besides pointing out the relative advantages and disadvantages of the three translations in specific cases, it draws the following conclusions as well as questions open for discussion: despite the cultural information that the alienating method transfers, its effect on the target text readers depends on their level of understanding; communication through translation can hardly be complete, because of the subjective messages that languages convey; our analysis is descriptive instead of prescriptive.