Aesthetic Representation In Literary Translation

Literary translation plays an important role in translation. To do a good work of translation, we need a coordination of various factors such as culture, history, religion etc. This thesis, combining the schema theory and the study of aesthetic translation, made a comparative study on Dong Qiusi and Zhang Guruo's two versions of David Copperfield, and from which some examples are extracted to illustrate three aspects of literary translation: aesthetic representation of beauty in meaning, aesthetic representation of beauty in form, aesthetic representation of beauty in sound. In the part of aesthetic representation of beauty in meaning, conceptual meaning, propositional meaning, contextual meaning and pragmatic meaning are discussed. In aesthetic representation of beauty in form, the parallelism, antithesis and beauty in rhetoric are specifically discussed. What's more, simile, metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole and pun are discussed in terms of representation of beauty in rhetoric. In aesthetic representation of beauty in sound, rhythm and onomatopoetic are further discussed. Based on the schema theory, the methodology employed in this thesis is mainly comparative study. The purpose is to probe into the cognitive aspect of aesthetic representation in literary translation.Through the detailed analysis of aesthetic representation of "three beauty", this thesis finally comes to a conclusion that aesthetic representation in literary translation is a cognitive filtration, namely, cognitive filtration of assimilation and accommodation, which seems to exist in aesthetic representation of meaning, form and sound. When translating, if the translator can deal with the Tsl with all his knowledge, or, with his existing schema, the cognitive filtration is assimilation. If the translator's knowledge is not ample to represent the beauty of the Tsl, he needs to make up the original schema default or to tune the original schema to accommodate the new information, hence the cognitive filtration is accommodation. And translator unconsciously exerts these two ways of cognitive filtration in his translation to serve for the purpose of translation—to maximumly represent the beauty in the Tsl.