Harmony Between Fidelity And Beauty

Poetry translation, as a special branch of Literary Translation, has been a much concernedfocus of translators for many years. The translatability of Chinese Classical Poetry, due to itsunique form and abundant cultural connotations, is also a noticeable controversy amongtranslation schools. Translators devoted to translating classical Chinese poetry into Englishroughly fall into three schools, namely verse translation, prose translation and re-creation.Traditional translation theories, based on the original-oriented evaluation standard tend toseek "equivalence" in translation. However, due to different language characteristics andcultural custom, the equivalent version often can not gain a satisfying effect. And it is notalways suitable to use this theory to evaluate the translated version of Chinese classical poetry.The Functionalist Theory, which emerged in German in 1970s, with Skopostherie as a core,stresses that the translation purpose decides the whole translating process, and thus holds afar-reaching guiding significance for literary translation, especially verse translation.The biggest contribution of Functionalist Theory is that it reverses the usual translationassessment process by using the function of the translated version as criteria to determinespecific translation strategy and to decide what should be transmitted into the target language.Of course, different translators may get different conclusions based on differentconsiderations. This also explains why there are different versions for the same original text.They are different from each other, but this doesn't necessarily mean only one of them is good.The reason is just that they hold different purposes and adopt different strategies. Thus thistheory also provides a practical criterion for the evaluation of different versions. That is, abetter version is the one that could better fulfill the translation purpose in a given context.Yuan songs, Tang poems and Song lyrics are deemed as three peaks of the Chinese literature.It is the cultural treasure of the Chinese nation as well as the precious heritage of worldculture. However, due to some reasons, it has not gained deserved attention. Today varioustranslated versions of Tang poems and Song lyrics are being published and studied, whilerelated studies on the translation of Yuan songs as well as the translated versions areunbelievably rare. Inspired by Functionalist theory and its application on literary translation,this thesis chooses the only two English anthologies of Yuan songs by far for case study.Through the description and comparison of the purposes and theoretical bases of the twotranslators, this thesis eventually demonstrates that Yuan songs are translatable and purposesdetermine the selection of translation materials and strategies. Therefore, evaluation oftranslation should be combined with the consideration of translation purpose to guarantee theobjectivity.