A Report On The C-E Translation Of Ordinary Life In Harbin City(Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Translation Aesthetics

Ordinary Life in Harbin City is the latest masterpiece of Chi Zijian,the winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize,and has been listed into "Great Chinese Books" in 2020.Beautiful writing style,sensitive and delicate descriptions make each chapter of this novel read more like a prose,which is full of aesthetic values.Precisely due to this feature,its translation is more challenging than other ordinary novels.In order to retain the qualities of beauty in translation,the author attempts to obtain methodological guidance from the theory of translation aesthetics.The theory of translation aesthetics is the product of the "marriage" between translation and aesthetics,which inherits the aesthetic features of traditional Chinese translation theory while also drawing on the rich connotations of Western aesthetics.The An Introduction to Translation Aesthetics written by Liu Miqing uncovers the aesthetic origins of translation studies,explores the special significance of aesthetics in translation studies,establishes the basic framework of modern translation aesthetics,and paves the way for new approaches to the study of modern translation aesthetics in China.Informed by Liu Miqing’s translation aesthetics theory,this report finds that the aesthetic features of the source text can be elaborated from two aspects:the formal system and non-formal system.The beauty in formal system is predominantly reflected at sound,character,lexicon and sentence level,while the beauty in non-formal system is mostly manifested in emotions,images and symbols.In order to preserve the qualities of beauty of the source text in the practical translation,the author adopts two aesthetic representation methods--"imitation" and "recast(or rewrite)"--to flexibly handle the translation of onomatopoeic words,pictographic characters,puns,culture-loaded words,set phrases,sentences,images,and so on.However,when confronted with the translation aesthetic representation of pictographic characters,puns,culture-loaded words,set phrases,etc.,the author finds out that the sole employment of imitation is far from enough while the method of recast is not suitable for this situation.After deep consideration,the author decides to add the strategy of amplification on the basis of imitation,so as to achieve the translation aesthetic representation of the source text to the maximum extent.Finally,this report summarizes the major findings and limitations with the aspiration to provide some valuable references for future translations of novels which boast abundant aesthetic values.