A Study On Translation Object And Translation Subject From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

Translation has been long existing in our life as an art. Since the first communication of people in different languages, translation has made its appearance. With the social development in the past thousand years, further studies of translation have been made by us. From a branch of linguistic to an independent subject, now translation has been studied together with aesthetics. Our research of translation is no longer restricted to language level as well as setting forth translation methods and strategies. Our attention has been laid upon the subject of translation activity--translators.The translator is different from regular readers and critics, because reading of the original text is only the beginning of the journey of translation. The origination and development of translation aesthetics provide us with a deeper view of the translator's activity in the whole process of translation aesthetic experience. First of all, the translator, as the reader of the original text, carefully reads the original text, feels and appreciates its beauty, then represents the beauty in the translation with his mastery of the target language. Though it sounds like very easy, to those who have ever been a translator, it is really painstaking, just as Professor Liu Miqing said in his book "it's hard to move forward with so many restrictions."(刘宓庆,2005) How to further study translation and aesthetics' relationship and promote translation's development is a question lying before us. What we should do is to use the new theories of west and east, the linguistic and aesthetic theories to clearly and systematically explore translation and aesthetics. This thesis will study the relation between Source Text (Aesthetic Object) and translators (Aesthetic Subject) from the perspective of aesthetics and draw the conclusion that:the translators should promote their aesthetic sense and aesthetic competence to be capable and creative enough to overcome TAO's objective conditionings and bring the aesthetic properties of the Source Text to the highest possible aesthetic perfection. Large numbers of bilingual translation examples, done by either foreign translators or domestic translators are quoted and discussed as examples to support my view.This thesis consists of four chapters. At the beginning, the author raises the study question and introduces the aim and significance of the study. After that, the author looks back to the traditional aesthetic views in the east and west and lays the theoretical foundation of this thesis. The similarities and dissimilarities between Chinese and western aesthetic traditions may help us find out the commonness and idiosyncrasy, the universality and particularity between them so that we can get enlightenment from western translation theories and develop those of our own. After the literature review, the author makes detailed study of TAO and TAS. The translation aesthetic object's objective conditionings will be discussed from two aspects:the form system and non-form system. The author also talks about the translators'subjective dynamic perspective. To what extent can the translation aesthetic subject bring untranslatability down to the lowest level? Only after we are fully conscious of the subjective initiative of the translators, we can figure out how to improve the quality of the translators and their translation. At the end of this thesis, the author states the contributions the thesis might bring to the field of study, and calls for further research on aesthetic translation.To sum up, it is quite necessary to study the translation aesthetic subject and use aesthetic theories to guide translation practice and infuse readers a new thinking pattern, method and means. It is expected that the aesthetic perspective will shed new light on the study of bilingual translation and will be beneficial to the future study.