Transference And Translation Strategies Of Imagery In The Classical Chinese Poetry

The classical Chinese poetry is the gem of Chinese literature, the distillate of Chinese language as well as the carrier of China's ancient culture and history. Imagery can be seen as the soul of classical Chinese poetry and its abundant employment in classical Chinese poetry makes the ancient poetry have its unique appeal. Moreover, imagery is the carrier of profound implications. It performs as words, phrases or sentences which can all arouse the readers to imagine and associate, so it serves as the key to our interpretation of the classical Chinese poetry. Because of the importance of imagery in the classical Chinese poetry, a large number of translators and scholars at home and abroad commit to the practice and research of imagery translation in order to find out the most appropriate translation strategies for imagery and then make the target language readers to have the similar artistic enjoyment as the source language readers do and have the ability to interpret the unique charm of classical Chinese poetry. On the basis of the summary of domestic and foreign imagery theories and researches of the imagery translation of classical Chinese poetry, the author carries on some research on the importance, principles and strategies of imagery translation. In addition, the author also sums up some insurmountable translation obstacles with the help of present translation strategies through the process of imagery transference and thus points out the direction for further research.As the soul of poetry, the transference of imagery is of great significance. The numerous vivid images in the classical Chinese poetry attract scholars and translators at home and abroad to conduct the imagery translation research and practice. Professor Xu Jun has proposed three levels of literary translation, namely, the thinking level, the semantic level and the aesthetic level. The commonality between English and Chinese poetry at the thinking level constitutes the basis for the translatability of imagery. Imagery materialized in linguistic symbols can be regarded as the basic unit for both semantic level and aesthetic level. As for the translation of imagery at the two levels, there are different principles and strategies for each of them. At the semantic level, the translators should follow the principle of semantic equivalence and adopt such translation strategies as preserving, substituting and deleting the images of the original poems. At the aesthetic level, translators should try to achieve equivalence in aesthetic function of imagery between source language and target language text. The aesthetic function of imagery in poetry mainly consists in two levels, namely, the affective level and sensuous level. In other words, imagery can give target language readers aesthetic enjoyment in these two aspects. The thesis analyzes the beauty of imagery at the two levels with examples selected from classical Chinese poems and then explores corresponding translation strategies by making comparative studies on their different translations.The whole paper consists of six chapters. In the first chapter, the author puts forward the research premise, namely, the translatability of classical Chinese poetry, and the research questions of this thesis. She also tries to systematically summarize the domestic and foreign imagery theories and makes a relatively comprehensive study on the translation principles and strategies of imagery on the basis of the researches made by the translators and scholars at home and abroad; the second chapter puts forward the status quo of the imagery translation and according to the different claims of classical Chinese poetry's rendering, there are three translation schools, namely, the classical school, the creative school and the free school; Chapter Three deals with the comprehensive introduction to the imagery in the classical Chinese poetry including its definition, classification and features which serves as the basic information for the research on the translation principles and strategies of imagery. The main body of this thesis is Chapter Four and Five which mainly discuss the translation principles and strategies for the imagery in the classical Chinese poetry and conclude the insurmountable translation obstacles in the process of translating with the present translation strategies, which include the loss of cultural information and the poet's writing style. The conclusion of the thesis is in the last chapter which offers the main findings and limitations of this research and the directions for further research...