Translation Of Poetic Images In The Cultural Perspective

As the most concentrated and condensed form of literature, poetry is the gem of a language and the crystallization of a culture. Classical Chinese poetry (CCP) is the reflection of the traditional Chinese culture and is imbued with cultural connotations. The essence of CCP lies in the arrangement of images. Images constitute the core of CCP. Image translation, in essence, is a practice to realize the intercultural communication. The successful translation of CCP, to some extent, depends on the successful translation of poetic images. Image translation is an important part of the deep cultural exchanges between different peoples. The paper, therefore, attempts to make a tentative study on the translation of poetic images in the cultural perspective. It consists of five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the importance of the translation of poetic images. Images in CCP are the crystallization of Chinese culture, and the translation of the images serves the purpose of intercultural communication.Chapter Two is Literature Review. Nowadays, as translation studies develops and intercultural communication increases, more and more scholars turn their eyes from the mere linguistic level to the cultural level. Mary Snell-Hornby, for example, considers translation as an interaction between two cultures. Bassnett and Lefevere even consider culture as the basic unit of translation and claim that it is the time for cultural studies to turn to translation studies. Taking this cultural perspective into consideration, the paper author states that translation of the images in CCP is essentially an intercultural exchange or event. It also proposes that transplanting and rewriting are the two basic approaches in image translation.Chapter Three mainly explores the cultural perspectives on poetic images. Due to the complexity of image, the paper offers a compromising rather than a clear-cut and all-inclusive definition of its own, that image is a product combined by the individual pictures of object with subjective emotions. Then the author explores the cultural factors in poetic images, which are generalized into two categories: cultural absence and cultural difference. Cultural absence is manifested in allusions, symbols, metaphors, and social custom; cultural difference comprises difference in form, meaning, association, and different aesthetic cultures.Chapter Four probes into the cultural approach in translating poetic images-transplanting and rewriting. Both are termed from the perspective of the intercultural communication and the goal of them is to ensure the nature of the cultural images and the cultural flavor of the original. The cultural approach of transplanting and rewriting the images in CCP is generally implemented through four basic methods, namely image preservation, image modification, image addition and image omission. Chapter Five is Conclusion. The cultural approach of transplanting and rewriting can provide a new perspective to image translation, which will play an increasingly important role in the cultural communication between different peoples in the age of globalization.