A Comparative Study Of Pound's And Lu Xun's Unfluent Translation

The present thesis makes a comparative study of Ezra Pound's and Lu Xun's unfluent translation. Unfluent translation eschews a fluent strategy in order to reproduce in the translation whatever features of the foreign text abuse or resist dominant cultural values in the source language (Vuneti1995: 24). Both Ezra Pound and Lu Xun are among the important translators who have employed unfluent strategy in their translating practice. The comparison between their unfluent translation will focus on three aspects-the causes of their unfluent translation, the specific methods used in their unfluent translation and the influence of their unfluent translation. By employing unfluent translating strategy, both Pound and Lu Xun sought to free the reader of translation, as well as the translator, from the cultural constraints that ordinarily govern their reading and writing. Pound had hoped to free the readers and translators from the constraints of stiff and decadent language style of Victorian poems. Lu Xun wanted to set the readers free from the imprecise and sloppy Chinese at his time. In their unfluent translation, Pound and Lu Xun used similar translating methods. They tried to preserve the form or language features of the original texts, so they chose extreme literal translation and even word-for-word translation. Both Pound's and Lu Xun's unfluent translation caused great change in literature and posed challenge to translation norms. Ezra Pound's unfluent translation in his "Cathay" directly helped the emergence and growth of Imagism in American literary history. Lu Xun made contributions to the popularity of Chinese bai hua, and his unfluent translation to some extent functions as vanguard in Chinese language revolution. Furthermore, Pound's and Lu Xun's unfluent translation challenged the dominating fluent translating strategy. Unfluent translation presents differences between languages and cultures. When a certain aspect in TL culture needs to be improved and even changed, these differences can be an important inspiration: translators import new expressions of language and new ideas of literature through unfluent translation...