A Comparative Study On Allustion Translation Strategies In English Translations Of Dou E Yuan

As the essence of culture, allusion embodies the connotation of the national culture. The story of Dou E Yuan, one of the representative works of Guan Hanqing, is based on the legend of Zhou Qing in the Han Dynasty. Current studies of Dou E Yuan are usually carried on a qualitative basis. This paper is an attempt to study the translation strategies of allusion in the two English translations of Dou E Yuan both qualitatively and quantitatively from the perspective of cultural vacancy.In this study, parallel corpora of the Chinese original of Dou E Yuan together with its two English translations are built by the author. Then a comparative study of the translation strategies of allusion is conducted on a basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The author proposes some methods for translating allusions.From the comparative study, the author of this thesis comes to the conclusion that both Yang and Shih take some measures to make up for the cultural vacancy in their translations. Although both of them adopt strategies of domestication and foreignization in their translations, they have their different trends of applying translation strategies. This study shows that there is a significant divergence in the choice of translation strategies adopted by Yang and Shih respectively.