On Translation Of Chinese Classical Poetry

This thesis attempts to facilitate the practice of translation as a whole by approaching the translation under the guidance of the two well-known theories: the Reception Theory and the Functional Equivalence theory.Though there are quite a lot of works on the strategies dealing with translating cultural information, a very crucial factor in translation has been neglected. That is the reader. As a new and influential model and methodology in contemporary western literary theories, the Reception Theory distinguishes itself by shifting the focal point of literary criticism from author-text to text-reader. It holds that the actualization of the meaning of a literary text is inconceivable without the participation of readers. Enlightened by this theory, many translators adopt the strategy of literal translation and believe it is the right way to engage the readers' horizon of expectation.However, many readers find that some of the literal translation is difficult to understand, and gradually lose interest reading the translated text. According to Eugene A. Nida, he remarks "the readers of a translated text should be able to understand and appreciate it in essentially the same manner as the original readers did" (Nida, 1993: 316-317). In order to reach this degree, free translation should be adopted as well and much information, the cultural information in particular, has to be altered. But, sometimes, such kind of strategies would impair the cultural information in the text.Chinese classical poetry is the essence of Chinese culture, and in the life and history of the Chinese people, nothing is more tightly woven into their culture thanpoetry. Because of the national images and falvor, Chinese classical poetry impose a huge obstacle for translation. This thesis mainly focuses on the cultrual information in the literary work and tries to incorprate the above-mentioned two theories in order to find a better way to deal with the problem of literal and free translation. At the same time, this thesis, narrowing down to explore effective solutions for the translation of Chinese classical poetry, is expected to be conducive to the practice of translation as a whole and development of translation theory.This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter one gives a general introduction of the two theories and their enlightenment to the translation strategies. Chapter two is about what an ideal literal translation should be like and the incorpration of the two theories in translating cultural information. Chapter three gives the brief introduction of Chinese classical poery and present several models of the classical poems. In order to find an ideal translation version, the author makes a comprison by providing different translated versions by different translators to a same poem.The author has no intention to draw a crystal clear line between the strategies of literal and free translation, but attempts to provide a new vision for translation.