A Study On The Reproduction Of Ancientness In Three Kingdoms By Moss Roberts

Cultural communication is the crucial power to promote the development of the world. The traditional Chinese culture is among the most important parts of glorious world culture. As the main road to the world for Chinese classical culture, the translation of traditional Chinese classics has attracted more and more scholars' attention both at home and abroad. Whether it is necessary to reproduce the flavor of ancientness and how to realize it are controversial problems and have become the central issue which has frustrated the academic translation field. As one of the most famous literary novel in China, its language is both exalted and down-to-earth. This thesis reviewed different ideas about this issue both at home and abroad, and built a parallel corpus based on Chinese San Guo Yan Yi and its English version translated by Moss Roberts. By comparing the differences of ancient Chinese and English language, the author conducted specific analysis on lexical, syntactical and esthetical level with the support of examples from the English version Three Kingdoms, and demonstrated the possibility and necessity for reproducing the flavor of ancientness in literary classics translation. At last, the thesis attempted to propose some translation strategies with which the limitation are presented as well. This thesis offers the following findings:(1) It is necessary to reproduce the flavor of ancientness moderately in literary classics translation.(2) Three Kingdoms, the English version of San Guo Yan Yi translated by Moss Roberts, employed many ancient or archaic words and expressions as well as Old English grammar, and adopted a combined strategy of literal and free translation, domestication and foreignization. As a result, the flavor of ancientness in the original text was reproduced successfully.(3) For the reason of reproducing the ancientness in literary classics translation, the translator is encouraged to take full advantage of target language, employ some archaic words, old grammar form and rhetoric devices with the same or similar effect both in source language and target language, and adopted binary translation strategy with combination of literal and free translation, domestication and foreignization.