On Translating Personal Reference In Tang Poetry From The Perspective Of Translator's Discourse Context

The contrastive studies of personal reference between Chinese and English have been conducted by scholars at home and abroad. However, most of them are concerned with the theoretical explanation itself. There are different theories, such as semantics, syntax, pragmatics and cognition, explaining this phenomenon. The present thesis chooses a new angle to investigate personal reference in Tang poetry for the purpose of finding out the special usage of personal reference and their similarities and differences between Chinese Tang poetry and its English translations. It first conducts a quantitative analysis to generalize the usage and the similarities and differences of personal reference between Tang poetry and its two English versions and then employs the translator's discourse context to illustrate this phenomenon.The present study chooses twenty one Tang poems and its two English versions translated by Xu Yuanzhong and Witter Bynner as the data to build a mini-database. In the light of the translator's discourse context, including both the intratextual context and extratextual context, the present author makes the research on translating personal reference in Tang poetry and proposes that the process of translating personal reference is, in essence, a communicative process in which the translator comprehends a source language text (SLT) and then composes a target language text (TLT). Finally, a conclusion is drawn that it is useful to adopt translator's discourse context studying the different translation strategies on personal reference in Tang poetry more intensively and systematically. Through a careful study on the data extracted from the database, the author of the thesis has obtained the following findings: zero reference is quite common in Chinese, but rarely seen in English where more pronouns retain; the strategies of translating personal pronoun are different in intratextual context and in extratextual context. According to these two findings, the deeper motivation and concrete translation strategies are discussed so as to promote the further study on the English translation of Tang Poetry.