Poetics In Translation

In the late twentieth century,with the emergence of the cultural turn in social science researches,the focus of literary translation studies has shifted from the source-oriented and prescriptive studies to the target-oriented and descriptive studies. With the advent of the cultural turn in translation studies,the problem of cultural translation has moved to the forefront.Translation is not just considered as a pure and transparent transformation from one language to another,but a form of rewriting and acculturation.As one of the representative of the Cultural School,Andre Lefevere puts forward the Rewriting Theory.According to him,translation is not merely an act completed by the translator's personal preference,but an act constrained by various forces including ideology,poetics and patronage in the overall environment.Based on the viewpoint of poetics in translation in the Rewriting Theory,the thesis attempts to probe into the significance of poetics in translation by studying Zhu Shenghao's translation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.It aims at demonstrating how poetics plays an important role in translation.According to Lefevere,the poetics in translation consists of two components: one is an inventory of literary devices,genres,motifs,prototypical characters and situations,and symbols;the other is a concept of what the role of literature is,or should be,in the social system as a whole.That is,the poetics consists of two components - the inventory component and the functional component.The innovation of this thesis lies in analyzing from the macro level and the micro level of the role of poetics in translation and its embodiment.In the macroscopic analysis of the functional component of poetics,this thesis investigates the trend of poetics in Zhu Shenghao's time and the poetics of the readership;and in the microscopic analysis of the inventory component of poetics,it investigates the lineuistic features of the translated version.