Comparative Studies On Chinese Translations Of Gitanjali From A Sociosemiotic Perspective

Known as a worldwide celebrated poet, novelist, dramatist,educationist, musician and painter, Rabindranath Tagore was blessed withthe first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in the honor ofGitanjali in 1931. The masterpiece, "expressed in his own English words',has become 'a part of the literature of the West' due to its 'profoundlysensitive, fresh and beautiful verse'. Introduction to Tagore and thetranslations of his works became pervasive in China during 1930s.Subsequently, Tagore greatly contributed to the establishment of newpoetry in China and influenced numerous Chinese poets such as GuoMoruo, Xu Zhimo, Bingxin, Liu Bannong. Among them, Bingxin isentitled the best imitator of Tagore. Inspired and highlighted by The StrayBirds translated by Zheng Zhenduo, Bingxin published her first two poemanthologies The Stars and The Spring Water, which won her theforerunner of Chinese new poetry. The experience accumulated fromwriting and her adoration towards Tagore shaped her into the besttranslator of Gitanjali although a couple of translations appearedthereafter, represented by Bai Kaiyuan's translation.On the basis of sociosemiotic approach to translation, this thesispresents a comparative study between Bingxin's and Bai Kaiyuan's translations of Gitanjali. The essence of sociosemiotic approach totranslation is 'correspondence in meaning and similarity in function'proposed by Chen (陈宏薇1998:66). Since the similarity in functioncan only be attained through the transference of meaning, thecomparative studies concentrate on the meanings of all signs, which are'all types of elements—verbal, nonverbal, natural, artificial, etc.'As translation means translating meaning, the classification ofmeaning becomes the most prominent issue. Sociosemitics is a theorythat stems from semiotics, whose idea as an interdisciplinary mode forexamining phenomena in different fields emerged only in the late 19th andearly 20th centuries with the independent work of Ferdinand de Saussure,of Charles Sanders Peirce and of Charles Morris. Based on Peirce'striadic division of signs, Morris formulated a series of dear distinctionsamong the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic dimensions of a sign.Corresponding to these three distinctions are the three types of meaningsof linguistic signs, namely, referential meaning, linguistic meaning andpragmatic meaning. Referential meaning is the one built on the relation ofsigns to their referents. Linguistic meaning is the one produced by therelation of signs to each other within the same sign system. Andpragmatic meaning is the one built on the relation of signs to theinterpreters who use the signs.As for comparative studies of two translations, the quality of the version largely depends on the degree of transference of meaning. Withregard to the transference of referential meaning, this thesis emphasizeson translation of religious terms and mistranslations caused bymisunderstanding of the objects that signs refer to. Gitanjali, songofferings, contains a multitude of religious terms; meanwhile, owing tothe different understandings of Tagore's religious belief, these religiousterms possess quite diverse referents in the concepts of these twotranslators. By verifying the existence of God in Tagore's belief and byindicating Bai's discordance in translating religious terms, this thesisdemonstrates the predominance of Bingxin over Bai Kaiyuan intransferring referential meaning. In line with the characteristics of poetrytranslation, linguistic meaning is classified into rhetorical andnon-rhetorical meaning. In order to reproduce beauty in sound in TT,Bingxin substitutes Chinese prosody 'Dun' and 'Ping-Ze' for Englishmetric feet. Other rhetorical devices such as alliteration, repetition,antithesis, which contribute much to the beauty in sound, are alsodiscussed. Furthermore, this thesis also attaches much importance topunctuation marks whose functions in producing meaning have oftenbeen ignored. As to pragmatic meaning, studies have been focused onthe micro-scale, in other words, such social elements as the experience ofwriters and translators, the background knowledge, the sexdifferentiations have been neglected. However, one of the prominent features of sociosemiotic approach to translation is that all elements,inclusive of non-verbal signs, carry meaning. Therefore, this thesis notonly analyzes such linguistic elements as 'thou' and 'you' but alsoconcentrates on illustrating the influence of such paralinguistic elementsas gender and intentionality on the quality of translation.Owing to the holistic feature of sociosemiotic approach totranslation, the result obtained through comparison is more reliable andrational. Apparently, Bingxin's translation is much better than itscounterpart in terms of correspondence in meaning and similarity infunction.