A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Four Springs (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translation And Aesthetics

Chinese essays describe beautiful scenery,plain and touching emotions,thus activating aesthetic experience of readers.This report takes the Four Springs written by Lu Qingyi as the materials to be translated.And this collection of essays takes four springs as the time nodes,and documents the poetic daily life of an old couple living together in more than fifty years,beautiful natural scenery,and honest and simple people of Dushan county.Taking the excerpts of Brother Shuai,Uncle Wu,Fair-going days,The Memories of Mawei and Pick Wild Vegetables,and guided by the theory of translation and aesthetics proposed by Liu Miqing,this report aims to represent the aesthetics effects of the source text to the maximum to foreign readers.The theory of translation and aesthetics divides aesthetic object into two systems,formal and non-formal,and analyzes them from rhythms and rhymes,words and syntactic deviations,and emotions and imagery.It advocates the translation should go through the transformation from aesthetic awareness,aesthetic transfer and aesthetic processing and aesthetic representation,thus to represent the beauty of the source text to maximum degree.During translation,the translator mainly employs such translation principles as ―imitation‖,―recast or rewrite‖ and ―binary aesthetic principles‖,in combination with common translation strategies,like literal translation and free translation,thus achieving the same aesthetic effects as that of the source text.Phonologically speaking,the translator represents the beauty in sound mainly by means of imitation and rewrite,supplemented by rhyming,division and onomatopoetic words-seeking.In terms of lexical and syntactic levels,guided by translation requirements of essays proposed by Liu Miqing,the translator employs TL-oriented representation,and binary aesthetic principles such as specificness and contracting to translate four-character idioms;From perspective of syntactic deviation and rhetoric devices,the translator mainly uses TL-oriented representation,and dynamic imitation to express the same aesthetic effects as that of the source text,with division and combination supplemented.And in terms of beauty in emotions and imagery,the translator starts from emotional and stylistic words,culture-loaded words,and the whole paragraph,and renders them into English with TL-oriented imitation and equivalent compensation,and specific techniques of annotation and addition,aiming to recreate the artistic conception and imagery from the author of the source text.This project has realized the combination of modern essays and the theory of translation and aesthetics,which provides a new translation perspective for future translators.Based on the analysis result of translated text in terms of onomatopoeia,rhymes and rhythms,four-character idioms,syntactic deviations,rhetoric devices,emotions and imagery,the translated text has achieved aesthetic representation of the source text from phonological,lexical and syntactical perspective and imagery level.This project has provided reference significance aesthetically for future practice and research of translating essays,and solved the aesthetic problems that have not been covered in prose translating to some extent.