A Hermeneutic Study On English Versions Of Changgan Xing

Understanding is an essential process in the process of translation and to understand poems requires much effort on the part of the translator. The classical Chinese poetry, which is of great literary value in China and the world at large, needs much hard work from the readers. Hermeneutics is a subject concerning understanding and interpretation, and has been adopted in the field of translation studies. The connection between translation and hermeneutics lies in the possibility and process of understanding. The phenomenon that the same text is understood differently by translators can be explained in light of hermeneutics. Two versions of Li Bai's classical poem Changgan Xing are taken as an example to demonstrate the idea.The first part of thesis is a brief introduction to and review of the three concepts in Gadamer's hermeneutics and the relationship between hermeneutics and translation studies. In the second part, the author makes a brief introduction to the source text, Li Bai's Changgan Xing and two of its English versions respectively by Pound and Xu Yuanzhong. The disparities between the source text and English versions are demonstrated and cited. In the last part, hermeneutics is adopted to make an explanation of the phenomenon mentioned in the previous part. From the study of Gadamer's hermeneutic view of understanding, a better understanding of the causes is obtained for the differences in the English renderings of Changgan Xing.In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates that discrepancies in translations can be approached from Gadamer's hermeneutics and we should stop regarding translation as the absolute equivalence of the source text due to the cultural and other factors which exert great influence on the translators.