A Semiotic Approach To The Fuzziness In Translating Classical Chinese Poetry

Translation has become more of a transdisciplinary subject. The establishment of multidisciplinary translatology is built on the development of other disciplines. Semiotics, being the semantic and logic bases for other social and humanistic studies, can give an accurate description and scientific analysis of indeterminate cultural and academic phenomena.This thesis briefly reviews the historical background and recent development of fuzzy linguistics and literary semiotics in each other's fields. By employing related concepts and theories in literary semiotics, it gives a fresh "scientific" structuralist interpretation of the pervasive fuzziness in classical Chinese poetry, and demonstrates, with concrete verse translation, the applicability of literary semiotics to the studies on the translation of classical Chinese poetry into English.In order to make translation, the most important interlingual and intercultural intercommunication act, go on wheels, codes should be of stability and regularity to a certain extent. However, when composing poems with codes, poets would intentionally destroy the combination rules in which the signifier/signified relationship in the poetic signs is no longer exclusive and determinate but complicated and indeterminate, or rather, the self-reflexivity of the signifier is strengthened. Thus, the poetic language becomes signifier-predominant signs, or "poetic" signs—the signifier refers to the signified opaquely, becoming "semi-transparent". Non-referentiality between the signifier and the signified is a kind of extra-semantic use of language. Due to the non-referentiality (polysemy) between qualisign and legjsign, and the indeterminacy (ambiguity) of the signification of a single signifier/signified relationship, classical Chinese poetry is often marked by fuzziness which is mainly embodied in the following three semiotic layers: lexical semantics, syntax and imagery.Through a semiotic analysis of the fuzziness in classical Chinese poetry, this thesis aims to illustrate that translators, in undertaking the English translation of classical Chinese poetry, have to pay more attention to such differentiae of literature as lexical semantic fuzziness and syntactic indeterminacy, and do sufficient intertextual research on the symbolized fuzzy images. Considering the feature that classical Chinese poetry is focused on image construction but lacks formal linkage, translators have to make a compromise between disjointed translation and prosaic translation with the ultimate aim to preserve properly in their translations the corresponding fuzzy aesthetic effect of the original classical Chinese poetry.