| Only through translation can different peoples in different societies communicate with each other. Translation is an art, a bilingual art. Like painting, translation is a representation or recreation in one language of what is written or said in another language, not in colors, but in words. Strictly speaking, translation is a kind of science because it has a whole set of rules governing it and certain objective laws to go by in the process of translating just as other sciences do. In translation, certain skills and technique are needed in order to attain clearness of style, and fluency in language. What is discussed in this paper is imagine retaining and transforming, an effective way used in translation in order to fully and completely convey or transmit the original content or thought.1. Language is social thing. Although different people in different societies have different cultures, they all live on the same earth, and different societies have experienced almost similar developing stages. Therefore, there exist many common things and similarities among different people and cultures. In terms of culture and language, it suggests that people in different culture may use different language to refer to the common imagine. And these are the things through which different people communicate with each other, and also the things which make the imagine retaining in translation possible.2. English and Chinese are two entirely different languages. Each has an individual and distinct system. There are lots of dissimilarities between them in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammatical relations and sentence construction. Different social developing histories, distinct cultural backgrounds, living styles, customs, religious believes and moral conceptions may cause differences in language. In different histories and societies, people choose their distinct languageto express the common ideas. This indicates that there is something common among different languages, the only different thing is the way used. That is to say, the same idea may be expressed by adopting different imagines in different languages. And this is the certainty of imagine transforming in translation.3. Translation aims at full and complete conveying or transmission of the original content or thought. The way to deal with the imagines in the source language consists of three stages, i.e. imagine retaining, partially imagine transforming, and complete imagine transforming.(1) When the imagine in source language has an equivalency in target language, and even if it is translated literally, it can fully, accurately convey the thought in the source language, it should be retained completely, not be transformed.(2) In source language, there exist many expressions or imagines which have very strong local customs and are very meaningful, and their equivalencies are hard to find in the target language. If they are retained and translated literally, they will go against the expressions in target language; if they are expressed by the imagines familiar to readers in target language, they would not be as forceful, meaningful as those in source language. Then, in order to fully convey the original thought, the target language should be changed partially.(3) Some distinct imagines in source language are very different from those in target language. This may be caused by accent, morphology and culture. This results in "vocabulary vacancy" in target language, or the imagine contain a very different idea from that in target language. Then the imagine in the source language should be completely transformed, and the expressions common and familiar to readers should be adopted, under the circumstance that the thought in the source language not be changed.The imagine retaining and transforming in translation can be used in accordance with certain established rules. The translated version should neither go against the habitual expressions of the target language nor go too far away from the thoughts conveyed in the source l...
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