An Iconic Approach To The Transference Of Sound In Poetry Translation

Poetry translation is unanimously agreed to be the most difficult work in the field of translation and one of the difficulties lies in the transference of sound. Sound is an essential element in poetry. The poet, unlike the man who uses language to convey only information, chooses his words for sound as well as for meaning, and he uses the sound as a means of reinforcing his meaning. This indicates the strong relationship between the phonetic and the semantic levels of poetry. Iconicity regards linguistic structures and forms as directly reflecting concepts and experience structures. That is to say, there exists an inherent connection between linguistic form and content. The theory of iconicity reveals the iconic relationship between linguistic form and content, providing us with a new perspective for the study of poetry translation. This thesis will study the transference of sound in poetry translation from the perspective of iconicity.Iconicity refers to a natural resemblance or analogy between the form of a sign and the object or concept it refers to in the real world or rather in our perception of the real world. Iconicity falls into three main types: imagic iconicity, diagrammatic iconicity and metaphorical iconicity. Imagic iconicity in language suggests that there exists a direct relation between the form (sound) and its meaning. Diagrammatic iconicity means the structure of linguistic representation sometimes resembles the structure of the content it conveys. In the seminar 'Iconicity in Language and Literature' held in Universitat Vienna in 2006, it is listed that the iconic forms on the sound level include onomatopoeia, sound symbolism, rhyme and rhythm, which lays the foundation for the structure of the case study in this thesis.Through the analysis of the transference of sound in Tu Fu's poetry, this thesis holds that an iconic approach to translation is favorable for the realization of sound effect. The translator's duty is to preserve the iconicity of the source poem in the target poem. In the source poem, the sounds reflect the meaning of the poem. When translating the source poem, the translator employs the iconic forms to render the iconicity of the source poem. Thus, the meaning of the source poem is fully conveyed and communication is intensified. The iconicity theory makes the combination of sound and sense possible and the sounds of the target poem may be rendered natural and correspond to its meaning in the target poem. It must be noted that this thesis has no intention in exaggerating the role of iconicity, or in denying the arbitrariness of linguistic signs, but brings new light in poetry translation and widens the scope of poetry translation study.