Transference Of Style In English Translation Of Su Shi's Ci-poetry

Su Shi is a literary giant with much talent in the history of classical Chinese literature. He has made outstanding achievements in poetry, prose, calligraphy and painting. In the aspect of Ci-poetry, he expands the theme range of Ci-poetry and liberates the form of Ci-poetry; moreover, he initiates the bold and unconstrained style of Ci-poetry.At the age of cultural diversity, rendering of Su Shi's Ci-poetry plays an important role in transmitting traditional Chinese culture. In poetry rendering, the content and the style are two primary factors. In this thesis, the emphasis is placed on style transference. Su Shi went through all kinds of hardships in his life, but he is a natural optimist with a broad mind. His thought is an integration of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. With his talent in literature, all these factors contribute to the different styles of Su Shi's Ci-poetry. In this paper, his Ci-poetry is classified into three main styles: graceful and restrained style, bold and unconstrained style, free and romantic style.There are numerous English versions of Su Shi's Ci-poetry at home and abroad but few researches have been done on the translation of his Ci-poetry. Based on relevance theory, a tentative research is conducted on the style transference of Su Shi's Ci-poetry. The author analyzes the transference of linguistic features and genre styles of Su Shi's Ci-poetry by comparing different versions in the thesis and concludes that, the best version to transfer the style of the original is the version which resembles the original as closely as possible in relevant aspects, i.e. preserves the communicative clues to the largest extent on the base of optimal relevance.This paper is composed of six parts:Chapter One consists of five sections introducing the motivation, significance, scope, methodology and the structure of the research.Chapter Two is literature review. The author introduces Su Shi and his life. Then the characteristics and contributing factors of the three main styles of Su Shi's Ci-poetry (graceful and restrained style, bold and unconstrained style, free and romantic style) are analyzed. Finally the author presents the achievement of relevance theory and its application in translation and points out that, there are few researches done on translation of Su Shi's Ci-poetry despite the numerous translation versions of Su Shi's Ci-poetry.Chapter Three offers the theoretical framework of current study. It gives an overview of relevance theory, including the source of relevance theory, several basic concepts in the theory and its application in the field of translation. Some important notions, that is, those most relevant to the study of style transference of Su Shi's Ci-poetry are given more attention to. In order to achieve optimal relevance, translated version should enable the target reader get enough contextual effect without spending unnecessary processing effort so that both the target reader's cognitive environment and the original author's communicative intention should be paid attention to. Translation should resemble the original as closely as possible within the cognitive environment of the target reader.Chapter Four and Chapter Five are the main body of the thesis. The author divides style transference of Su Shi's Ci-poetry into two levels: basic level and high level. Style translation on the basic level is the transference of the stylistic features of the original language. To preserve the stylistic features of the original is to retain the communicative clues in the translation. The author further analyzes the communicative clues on phonological level, lexical level and syntactic level. On the lexical level, the communicative clues can arise from different registers, lexical repetition, metaphors and so on; on the syntactic level, the communicative clues can arise from rhetorical questions, antithesis, allusions, etc. No matter what translation strategies are adopted, as long as the clues that guide target readers to the intended meaning of the author are embodied in target text, communicative clues are preserved.Chapter Five is the style transference of Su Shi's Ci-poetry on the high level from the perspective of relevance theory. Translation of style in literary works on high level is actually the transference of images. Due to the nuclear position of image in Ci-poetry, attention is focused on the image rendering in this chapter. The features of images in three main styles of Su Shi's Ci-poetry, namely, graceful and restrained style, bold and unconstrained style and free and romantic style are analyzed. The author believes that, communicative clues can also arise from images in Ci-poems, thus the style translation from the aspect of images is the preservation of communicative clues arising from images based on optimal relevance. The author compares different versions of the scholars and picks out the best one, that is, the one best conveys the original style.Chapter Six is the conclusion. Based on the study in previous chapters, the thesis comes to the conclusion that, taking optimal relevance as premise, the version which resembles the original most closely in relevant aspects is the version that best conveys the original style. The disadvantages of relevance theory and the problems to be solved are also pointed out in this chapter.