| This thesis is a tentative study of the translation of Tang Poems--a study that focuses on the cultural details that Tang Poems embody as well as some linguistic features that are worth investigating in the translation of Tang Poems.As is known to all, the Tang Dynasty is the peak period in the history of Chinese poems. As gems of Chinese poetry, Tang Poems reflect the humanities, the place and the people, the political and cultural life of the Tang Dynasty, and thus we can say that they are the cream of Chinese culture. Naturally, they are beloved by people both at home and abroad. However, in order to be genuinely understood and accepted by foreigners, who know little about Chinese culture, Tang poems must be translated cautiously and in detail. A rough and slipshod translation can be a blasphemy against Tang poems. In this sense, it is most important to grasp the cultural background in that period before one can study the translation of Tang poems from a cultural perspective. Culture will not fade as time goes by and will not vanish as the world changes.In the first part, the writer introduces the concept of translation and draws the conclusion that translation is cultural communication. And the writer also briefly discusses the principles of translation that are connected with, or dependent on, different aims of translation or different styles of the original works. For a popular science fiction or a report, exactness or faithfulness is more important than other aspects; for an advertisement, expressiveness is essential; for a literary work, elegance is vital. As far as the translation of poems is concerned, a synthetic principle is indispensable. Therefore, it is important to establish a set of principles before the translation. It is even more important to set up the aim of translation.Furthermore, macro-translation theories and micro-translation techniques also need to be discussed. Based on different purposes, translators have to choose different methods. The traditional methods of literal and free translation have been in translators' good grace, but they fail to mention under what conditions and for what reasons a translator use such methods. What they've emphasized are the surface changes of the two languages rather than the deep structure or relationship among all factors. Foreignization and domestication starting off by the skopos theory take culture, readers, writers, translators, the original work and the translated work into consideration. Guided by such theoretical concepts, translators can be conscious why they translate this way instead of other ways, and whom the translation is intended for. Indeed, foreignizing translation and domesticating translation can play asignificant role in guiding translation practice.The second chapter of the thesis treats the relationship between culture and the translation of Tang Poems. Robertson says: "Culture consists of all the shared produces of human society" (Robertson, R., 1992:8), and it of course includes the Tang Poems. Consequently, language and culture are inseparable, for "a language is part of a culture and a culture is a part of a language; the two are intricately interwoven so that one cannot separate the two without losing the significance of either language or culture" (Valdes, 1986:123). Language and culture evolve together and depend on each other in their development. It is translation that provides the two with chances to fuse into each other, to communicate between each other.Tang Poems (TP) embrace many facets of human life, ideas and experience. As is well known, the problems of rendering poetry from one language into another are always complex, much more so if it is from TP that are heavily culture-loaded into English. It requires not only accurate comprehension of their meanings and implications, but adequate representation of equal vividness, terseness, forcibleness and language colours as well. Thus we can see this is a process of intercultural communication.This part also deals with the tricky problem of translatability and untranslatability, especially in the translation of Tang Poems. The writer thinks that poetry is translatable, but there is a limitation in translatability. The question is only one of degree: Just as Catford says: "SL texts and items are more or less translatable rather than absolutely translatable or untranslatable "(Catford, 1980:93). The methods and criteria need to be investigated in relation to cultural parts, mainly the cultural images. In other words, translatability and untranslatability coexist, but they are represented at different levels in translation. Besides, since translatability is a developing progress, with the changes of time, conditions, readers, the readers' understanding, or other factors, those poems that were untranslatable may now become suitable for translation. Whoever has a good command of translation both in theory and practice might well offer satisfactory translation. After weighing the words and polishing the whole poem again and again, the translation of a poem will be possible.The third chapter, or the main body of the paper, expounds how to translate Tang poems in a desirable way and advances some points that may be worth exploring from many aspects such as, phonology, lexis, syntax, discourse, style, cultural images, rhetoric, ambiguity. Examples are cited to explain the reasons for mistakes as well.Many translators think that rhyme is one of the greatest or important features ofpoems, which is especially obvious in Tang Poems and it is almost impossible to translate it into English. However, the author finds it is not necessarily the case by comparison between the two languages. First, rhymes do exist in western poems. Second, there are plenty of vowels in both languages, and rhyme feet are always on the vowels. Third, rhymes in Tang Poems are clearer than those in the western ones, which include head rhyme, end rhyme and internal rhyme. These leave to translators enough space for creation, and good sound effect is available in the translated poems.While, from different points of view, different translators may offer different versions. As the saying goes, every action is guided by a skopos (Vermeer, 1989:228), it is the same in translating the rhymes in Tang Poems. It is true that the rhyme of a poem is important, but it must be achieved on the basis of content. Playing with words, or say, changing the last word of each line into the words that may share the same rhyme foot within the limitation of meaning is another indispensable condition. A good set of rhymes with poor meaning only mean to create another piece of work, then this only means absence of the spirit of Tang Poems.What's more, Chinese is a tone language. As we've seen, Tang Poems come from ancient songs, which involved various tones. As time passes by, the scale of tones has been simplified again and again and finally there are two main tones: the level tone and the oblique tone, in literary works, especially in Tang Poems. On the other hand, English is a stress-timed language. In the western poetry, iambic or accent scale represented by iambus trochee, anapaest and dactyl, is indispensable. This makes the translation not only fluent in reading, regular in the changing of accent or weak sound, but also fluent in meaning. Therefore, during the translation of rhythm, the writer has introduced another concept, morpheme, which refers to the smallest units of semantic content or grammatical function which words are made up of (Li Fuyin, 1999:23). In English there may be several morphemes or syllables in a word, therefore the number of syllables'^ line may not be equal to that in the next line, which makes it difficult or impossible to match the stresses one by one; but in Tang Poems, one word not only stands for one morpheme or one sound, but also stands for one tone. Thus, there are tones as many as words in a line in the original poem, which makes it easier for level tones or oblique tones to correspond with each other. As a matter of fact, in most cases, rhythms in the two different languages are not equal to each other. From the analyses, the author draws a conclusion that the rhythms in Tang Poems are translatable, and the functional equivalence in a general sense is possible, but some of the formal features or aesthetic beauty of the original may get lost. The TL readerscan hardly have the same response as what the SL readers have; the only thing that the translators are able to do is to make the translations approach the original as close as possible.In terms of the translation of some specific words in TP, much more importance has been attached to those words with deep cultural marks, such as words of appellation culture, time culture, geological culture, cultural words about weights and measures and some proper names as well. After thousands of years' cultural sediment, the special references of these words in TP are somewhat or completely different from those in present-day books. As for these phenomena, different translation methods are necessary, but either domestication or foreignization has its own advantages, and can be accepted in a certain sense. The former one cares about the "fluency" of the translated poem, so to speak, it has paid attention to the artistic value of the translated work which presents in the form of poem; but the latter one concerns with the feature of "accuracy", or "fidelity" to the original, that is to say, it has put emphasis on how to reproduce the original meaning accurately. But in the light of specific method, according to Newmark, transcription with a note or gloss should be the primary one.As far as syntax is concerned, there are many differences between Chinese and English. Mr. Wang Li points out: "Western language is rules-oriented, but Chinese is man-oriented" (Shen Xiaolong, 1990:141). As for the syntax, he says:" The structure of Chinese is close-knit and flawless, which is pooled by different parts mechanically but without vestiges. So Chinese grammar is inflexible, but Western grammar isn't." Specifically speaking, Chinese highlights paratactic or covert coherence, but English emphasizes hypotactic or overt coherence; Chinese highlights feeling for the meaning, but English emphasizes logical analysis.The Chinese sentence structure, in nature, is semantically connected, but English, based on form and logic, is syntactically connected. These are especially distinctive in Ancient Chinese. For instance, if we compare Chinese traditional paintings with western oil paintings, we may find that the former emphasize the general impression and effect than the latter, which tend to depict more details; if we examine Chinese calligraphy, we may find such principles as "intention goes before writing" and "writing brush stops but intention goes on".In poetry, Chinese seem to follow such vague principle as "to maintain a lukewarm relationship" and "no poem may be explained clearly and in great detail in the current language". That means poetry should be globally comprehended orparataxed. Under these circumstances, the author borrows English grammar to analyse the translations of TP, which are based on overall understanding of the original poems, and comes to a conclusion that in terms of poetry language, on the one hand, translators are restricted by several factors; and on the other hand, they are fairly free. Whether or not to complete the structure in translation or whether to adopt domestication or foreignization is, to a large extent, determined by consideration to facilitate readers' comprehension and acceptability. According to Venuti, one thing is certain: the translator's interpretive choices are made in answer to a domestic cultural situation.When it comes to the translation from the aspect of discourse, examples have been cited to illustrate that a creative artistic translation is quite necessary for literary translation, as Mr. Mao Dun said. Lowell's "Dancing" is a good case in point.And the author has also introduced the translation of some rhetoric forms in TP as puns, allusion, antonomasia, and so on.How to translate images, an inevitable factor in TP, is an important branch in the thesis. Images are artistic forms with special flavours and accepted through common practice, so they are often stable and irreplaceable semantic symbols (W-$,2001:143).With increasing cultural communication between China and foreign countries, people set a higher and higher demand on translation. The translations should be not only elegant or smooth, but also as exact as possible to convey the specific cultural images in the originals. This is particularly true in the translation of TP, because TP are regarded as the gems of Chinese culture. Otherwise, no matter how beautiful the translation is, it is a matter of regret to the readers. Hence, the translation of cultural images becomes more and more important.In this section, several versions of three typical poems are cited to illustrate some useful methods. For example, word-for-word translation, foreinization, transliteration plus notes, domestication plus notes, domestication, transliteration. The author deems although it is difficult for translators to decide whether to translate the meaning or to keep the images, they only need to bear their own responsibility, while, to trust the TL readers' capability of understanding.The present thesis also deals with some ambiguities that have been aroused by the wording in TP or by different understanding under entirely different cultural background, ancient Chinese or current Chinese. Some feasible therapies, such as to depend on the context while translating, to explain or decide on the meanings bynorms, to interpret the ambiguous meanings or even to translate with both senses in mind, have been recommended.The last section of this part handles some mistranslations. The writer analyses some heavily cultural-related forms from seven aspects such as single or plural forms, numeral, tense, notional words, functional words, speech part and mistranslations caused by additions, deletions or adaptations, so as to arrive at mutual encouragement.The translation of TP is a hard task that is related to almost all aspects of life. But translation cannot depart from foreignization or domestication, that is, the translators must translate either from the original text or from the readers' point of view. In fact, the two sides compliment each other. ,The last part is the conclusion of the thesis. The translation of poetry is no longer*an exchange in language, but, to a great degree, an intercultural communication. In the process of translating, the approach we should choose depends on a given context. So long as the method can provide a translation that is culturally informative, literally understandable, efficient in cultural exchange and as faithful to the original as necessary, the translation should be considered the best. As long as translators grasp enough knowledge and skills in languages, translation as well as the features and cultures embodied in TP, he can translate TP and introduce the Chinese culture gem to the world.
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