A Study Of Translation Of The Tang Poems From The Perspectives Of Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation

Whether poems, especially the traditional Chinese poems, are translatable or not is always a controversial issue. Although many translators at home and abroad have proved with their own poem-translation practice that poems are not untranslatable over the last century, the main concern of the translation researchers mainly focuses on whether their translations fully reproduce the magic of the original. In this paper, the author makes a detailed study of the role of the translators, the translatability of the Tang poems and the degree of the translatability of the Tang poems.The differences between the Chinese poems and English poems in the beauty in sound, beauty in sense and beauty in form bring about difficulty in conversion of metrics and grammar and obstacles to the exchange of different cultures and aesthetic taste. However, the translation between the Chinese poems and English poems is still practicable and there indeed have arisen many translation masterpieces with the painstaking effort of some great translators at home and abroad. In this paper, the author uses the famous translator as well as translation theorist Peter Newmark's theory"semantic translation"and"communicative translation"as the basis of his study to unfold different pictures of the translations of the Tang Poems by different translators, both at home and abroad. And from the different translation versions of some same poems by way of their own understandings of the poems and their unique expressive manners, the author will explore a more profound problem concerning culture, namely, how to better spread the tradition Chinese culture in the process of the translation of China's Tang Poetry. Although the translations of the Tang poems by means of"semantic translation"can maintain the form and content to the original, compared with those translations which are created by way of"communicative translation", they will inevitably unreadable for the foreigners due to the differences in language and culture between Chinese and English. As a result, the exchange of the Tang poems to the outside world will lose an important impetus in the process of the exchanges with other cultures.In the last part of Chapter Four, the author makes a study of the translatability of the translation of the Tang poems into English, and names some factors which hinder the translatability. However, due the openness of the languages and permeability of different cultures, the translatability of the Tang poems is a dynamic one which will change with development of the translation.