On Translating English And Chinese Prose From Aesthetic Perspective

Prose as a literary genre is characterized by comparative flexibility in form and diversity in content. Among all literary genres prose is admittedly the hardest one to render a certain definition. In regard to English prose, it has been defined in both broad and narrow senses. In the narrow sense, prose is referred to as the literary genre opposed to poetry. Broadly speaking, it refers to any literary writing in free form. In this thesis the author narrows the range of prose to those literary writings combining emotion, narration and argumentation together. Rather than the mechanical mixture of the above elements, narration and argumentation center upon emotion throughout the writing in order to achieve the aesthetic effect in the process of perusal. The rich artistic attainments embodied in prose appeal to the aesthetic feelings of the readers.In the past centuries, much of the attention has been attached to the study of poetry and fiction translation in China. By comparison, prose translation, no matter in practice or in theoretical study, has lagged far behind. Though there's an undeniable fact that prose translation accounts for a lion's share in translation activities and countless translators have been devoted to this cause, it's still pitiful to recognize that prose translation is far from good. The theoretical works concerning prose translation which explore the inner mechanism guiding the translating process are relatively scanty, especially those with unique perspective and systematic framework.In this thesis the author has made efforts to illustrate how to convey aesthetic information in prose translation and how to achieve equivalence of aesthetic effect between source language readers and target language readers. The thesis is comprised of four chapters. The first and the second chapters focus respectively on the definition and categorization of prose, translation aesthetic subject and translation object. Chapter Three gives a detailed investigation of formal system and non-formal system in translation aesthetic object and some examples have been presented correspondingly. In this chapter, the author attempts to expound that aesthetic information conveyed at the level of formal system can be transferred successfully through linguistic techniques. However, as for the aesthetic information embodied in non-formal elements, the conveyance turns out to be intractable, posing a challenge to translators. In fact, to what degree the aesthetic value of the original text can be conveyed is determined by the translators'bilingual capability and their own aesthetic competence. In Chapter Four, the author concentrates on how to translate the beauty of fuzziness which pertains to the domain of non-formal system. The tentative study in this chapter is based on the analysis of the intrinsic feats of the Chinese language which is characterized by unparalleled vagueness. Thus how to transfer the aesthetic information derived from vagueness in Chinese has been discussed and some principles given. The thesis ends with a conclusion which aims at generalizing the importance of conveying aesthetic information in prose translation.