Analysis And Re-creation

Proverbs, as the glittering gems of the cultural treasure house in the world, are the accumulation and crystallization by folk wisdom produced during production and life for so many generations, so they possess a very strong mass base and vigorous vitality. From the perspective of appearance, proverbs are not only terse in sentence patterns and balanced in structure but also rich and harmonious in rhythm and rhyme. On the non-appearance level, proverbs, simple and unadorned, are the cream of language and have long been justifiably entitled a highly condensed encyclopedia. Thus it is undoubtedly important for people to study and translate proverbs in the intercultural communication so that people may master and utilize them proficiently.Nonetheless, the good translation of proverbs is not an easy job since different nations have different cultures, histories and languages, which have together formed the diverse bases or deep meanings of proverbs and therefore have undoubtedly impeded the good grasp of such proverbs. To tackle this problem, it is helpful to pursue aesthetics in proverb translation because an excellent translation method of proverbs usually means the closest natural re-creation of source proverbs in target language, first in terms of meanings, and secondly in terms of aesthetic enjoyment. Hence the writer will mainly discuss aesthetics in translating proverbs in this paper so as to gain a better analysis, or rather to have a better re-creation of proverbs' properties through aesthetic view. That is why an aesthetic approach is utilized in this thesis. Theoretically, this approach will broaden research horizons of language and culture;practically, it will also contribute to foreign language teaching and transfer of research methods in translation theory. However, such a study has not been given its due attention, so far the author of this thesis has not found any single book devoted completely to this area, which means a contrastive aesthetic study of English and Chinese proverbs in a systematic way is yet to be made. Therefore, the author makes an attempt to probe into this field. Due to the limitation of her capacities and the length of this paper, she dares not to make any claim to say her work is complete or exhaustive. Instead, she only intends to concentrate on aesthetic implication of proverb translation from the perspective of analysis and re-creation.The thesis comprises five chapters. In Chapter One, a brief introduction is given to make clear the purpose, significance, theory basis and current studies both at home and abroad. Chapter Two is mainly about proverbs' definitions and importance of proverb translation, simultaneously, the author traces back to combination source between aesthetics and translation besides discussing research targets of translation aesthetics. The following two chapters serve as the main body of this thesis. Chapter Three exhaustively analyses aesthetic properties of source proverbs considered as one of aesthetic objects: appearance elements and non-appearance elements. In Chapter Four, the writer first gives the standard of translation aesthetics and the factors influencing aesthetic re-creation, and then focuses on discussing a series of methods to re-create aesthetic properties of source proverbs in target language. The closing chapter is a conclusion. The writer reviews what she has discussed briefly and points out in this chapter that applying the theory of translation aesthetics to proverb translation is just on the way to the construction of a new translation theoretical system. More and more exact theories and practices are needed to make translation aesthetics real in proverb translation.