Translator's Subjectivity In Tang Poems Translation

Tang Poem is a brilliant pearl in the world literature treasury. Their linguistic and structural uniqueness makes the translation even harder than common literary translation. The translator is the subject in translation practice. The translator's subjectivity manifests differently in Tang Poems translation from that in common literary translation. The translator's subjectivity manifests in way of the initiative, mobility and creativity and will be affected by both subjective and objective factors.The present thesis explores the translator's subjectivity in Tang Poems translation in the perspective of subjective and objective factors affecting the TS in the process of translation. Those subjective factors include the translator's life experience, personal interests and education background; the translator's competence to appreciate the beauty; the translator's manipulating competence in language and culture; and the translator's value and ideology. The objective factors include social background; restrictions from the original text; the expectation and background of the target reader; and the translation purpose. This thesis unfolds the research by a comparative analysis of Tang Poems translations by Xu Yuanchong and Rewi Alley. They are from different countries and have different backgrounds, values and ideologies. But both of them have great enthusiasm for Tang Poems translation, and both are great masters in bilingual and bicultural aspects. Owing to the differences between them, they take different translation strategies and skills even when translating the same Tang Poem. In other words, they manifest the translator's subjectivity differently.A translation process is usually divided into four phases, i.e. selecting the material, understanding the original text, expressing and final compensating. By exploring the two translator's different translation strategies and skills, it can be clearly seen that different prominence of aspects of beauty, sense and form will-result in different expression and translation. That reinforces the role of translator's subjectivity played in translation. The Three Beautifulizations Theory in Poetry Translation proposed by Xu Yuanchong has much enlightenment for deciding the translation strategy. And translation skills proposed in this thesis include addition, deletion, and alternation. The most difficult part for Tang Poems translation may be the exploration of the underlying cultural information of the much condensed and refined words. So how to remedy cultural deficiency and reconstruct the context in the target language is of great literary value and significance to the study of Tang Poems translation. This thesis takes some representative examples to analyze and illustrate how to remedy the cultural connotation of time; name and how to reconstruct the context in the target language.