A Descriptive Study:the English Translation Of The Peony Pavilion

A Descriptive Translation Study: The English Translation of The Peony Pavilionis based on the Chinese text and three English translations of The Peony Pavilion, themasterpiece by Tang Xianzu, an ancient Chinese playwright. Being a typicalrepresentative of the traditional Chinese culture, it plays a very important role in theChinese literary history for its great literary value. Up till now, the English translationpractice of The Peony Pavilion has been going on for some time, which has alreadyyielded recognizable achievements; however, the theoretical research into the Englishtranslation of this drama has been relatively inadequate within the world of translationstudies.In view of this situation, this dissertation is committed to acquiring profoundknowledge in the comprehension of the nature of the Chinese-English translationpractice of this drama as well as that of the original text, and thus trying to reveal thetranslation laws involved. Based on descriptive translation studies, this dissertationaims at constructing translation principles and modes for the English translation ofthis classical Chinese drama through general text analysis of the source text and thespecific study of the three English translations on basis of both qualitative andquantitative analysis.Specifically speaking, the descriptive translation study employed in this researchstarts with text analysis of the source text, which falls into the category of qualitativeanalysis. Through such analysis, four layers of textual features are extracted, whichrespectively refer to features in the stylistic, linguistic, cultural and aesthetic layer.After the identification of the four textual features, the author tends to build up aparallel corpus on basis of the translated materials chosen from Scene1to Scene30.And after the establishment of the translation corpus, the author manually annotates the corpus for different features in the translated materials, and thus makes aqualitative analysis of the English translation. Qualitative analysis is also carried outbecause it is also necessary for different translation strategies adopted by differenttranslators. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis is employed with the aim ofidentifying universal translation strategies and individual translation strategiesadopted by translators when translating specific textual features. They are laterincorporated to establish translation principles and modes for the English translationof The Peony Pavilion, namely, the cultural mode, the practical mode and theaesthetical mode, respectively represented by Birch’s translation, Zhang Guangqian’stranslation and Wang Rongpei’s translation.Naturally, the names of the three translation modes are subject to further testingof future translation practice for their validity. In short, whichever mode thetranslator adopts, this dissertation maintains that any translation will be considered asvaluable so long as it can achieve its communication aim and reveal the basiccharacteristics of drama translation. Moreover, if the translation is able to reproducethe aesthetic feature to the full, it will be regarded as an excellent work of translation.