Translation As Adaptation And Selection:Evidences From Chinese-English Translation Of Idiom Metaphors In Poetry

Translating Chinese ancient poetry into English has long been considered a difficult task, due to the fact that it needs profound knowledge as well as flexible translating techniques. It is considered even more difficult to efficiently convey in English the forms and the meanings of the idiom metaphors involve. To tackle both, many experts devote themselves either into doing theoretical research or practical translating and this paper is just one of the efforts to explore the issues by taking translation as adaptation and selection.Metaphor is a kind of figure of speech which is also the major principle of poetry. As a special form of language expression, metaphor has been influenced by culture, region, age, as well as ideological background etc. An idiom, similarly, is full of rich cultural connotation and national characteristics. It is not uncommon to find that an idiom works as a metaphor in the poetry. As a result, the translators need to find out efficient ways when doing translation so that they can skillfully translate the idiom into English without losing its language style, the image constructed as well as its artistic conception and emotion. Otherwise, the target language readers will not obtain the same or similar aesthetic feeling as the source language readers.This thesis, following the suggestion of Hu Gengshen to take translation as adaptation and selection, analyze historical metaphors, myths and legends metaphors, animal and plant metaphors as well as emotion metaphors widely used in Chinese ancient poetry so as to figure out to what extent the translators have adapted to the "three-dimension" proposed by Hu. It is found that during the process of translating, translators should adapt to the translational eco-environment which contains both linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors. Meanwhile, the degree of holistic adaptation and selection of the translation is in direct proportion to the degree of three-dimensional transformations which lies in linguistic, communicative and cultural dimensions. It is hoped that the research will provide a valuable reference for the future studies on metaphor translation of Chinese poetry.