A Contrastive Study Of The Wu Ballads And English Ballads And The Translation Of The Wu Ballads

The Wu ballads are an oral folklore in the Wu area of China, including the folk songs and folk poems, which are part of the oral literature by people of the lower social strata and are folk verses with strong national traits and local flavor. The Wu ballads are characterized by softness and smoothness like sipping waters with the charm of folk literature tainted with the sweet-sounding Wu dialect.However, nowadays few people know this precious oral heritage and it is certain that the Wu ballads will disappear in the near future if no measures are taken. All along few researches highlight folklores, especially some oral folklores at the edge of extinction like the Wu ballads. What we have done - translating the Wu ballads into English is a pioneering program, for this is the first time for our Chinese people to translate the Wu ballads into English to the readers at home and abroad. Our endeavors and hard works will no doubt draw more attention to the Wu ballads and other oral folklores at the edge of extinction so that these precious folklore heritages can be rescued promptly and invite further researches in the Wu ballads to promote Chinese folk culture.The significance of this thesis lies in the initiation of the research, including a systematic introduction to the Wu ballads and English ballads and a contrastive analysis between them. The most important, this thesis endeavors to propose the semantic and communicative translation approach can be employed to instruct the Wu ballads translation, which provides a new perspective and a possible reference for further researches to the Chinese folklores and their translations.To start with, this thesis makes a systematic introduction to the Wu ballads. Though the Wu ballads occurred five thousand years ago, few were recorded or characterized by the Wu dialect before the Han Dynasty. According to the collecting periods, three milestones in the history and development of the Wu ballads are respectively discussed. (1) Southern Dynasties (380-580AD): Wusheng Gequ (Songs in the Wu Dialect). (2) The Ming Dynasty (15th century): Feng Menglong's Shan'geanthology. (3) The modern times (1919-present): Gu Jiegang made great contributions to the collections and studies of the Wu ballads in the New Cultural Movement. After 1949, new government pays much attention to the collections and researches of the Wu ballads. Then a systematic introduction about the English ballads is made. In the English literature, there are two peak periods of ballad creations: (1) the popular ballads of 15th century: the folk ballads and the minstrel ballads. (2) the ballads collected and composed by Robert Burns in the latter half of the 18th century. Robert Burns is a Scottish poet of the peasants. His ballads focus on love, friendship, the beauty of the nature and the industry of the people. Based on the previous analysts, a contrastive study between the Wu ballads and English ballads at the level of the lexicon, subject, structure, style and rhetoric is conducted. Then this thesis highlights the translation of the Wu ballads, proposing Peter Newmark's semantic and communicative translation approach. The Wu ballads, a form of poetry, belong to the expressive texts according to Peter Newmark's categorization of textual functions, and the semantic translation approach should be the first choice in translating the Wu ballads, especially in translating the cultural elements of the Wu ballads, for the original and local flavor could be transferred and the purpose of promoting Chinese culture could be achieved. Finally two compensation devices for the semantic translation approach are proposed: annotation and amplification.