A Study Of Selected Modern Chinese Essays From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

Essay is an important literary genre which is popular with most readers due to its characteristics of free form and consistent theme. Although we have thousands of years research on essays, the study on essay translation has been left behind, to say nothing of the research from unique perspective or systemic framework.Translation aesthetics, the marriage between aesthetic and translation, is a relatively new translation theory. But dating back to the development of Chinese translation theories, it is not hard to find out that since ancient times Chinese traditional translation theory has been rich in aesthetic philosophy.In view of the above, with Liu Miqing'modern translation aesthetic theory as its theoretical basis and the three volumes of Selected Modern Chinese Essays translated by Zhang Peiji as its examples,the present thesis sets out to make a tentative study on the translation of modern Chinese essays. First , a brief retrospect on the origin and development of aesthetic and translation and their relationship, the contents of modern translation aesthetics, the translation aesthetic subject, translation aesthetic object, aesthetic consciousness system, and aesthetic representation have been discussed here in this thesis. As far as the translation aesthetic object is concerned, the aesthetic flavor of essay is mainly embodied in the formal and non-formal systems.Then, a relatively in-depth analysis has been made of Zhang's translation from the perspective of sound, word, sentence, emotion, artistic concept and style. The ideal of essay translation is the representation of the beauty of both two levels. Of course, it is not easy to achieve this, so the subjective aesthetic function of translators plays an important role here, especially the aesthetic consciousness system of translators. The subjective dynamics of translators is indispensable in every stage from comprehension and transformation to improvement and representation. It is a structure made up of systems. It is what the subject applied to capture and exhume all the aesthetic information, so as to make the aesthetic object possess aesthetic value. In the process of essay translation, the role empathy of the translator plays is especially important. In order to understand the emotions implied in the original text, the translator first projects his own feelings onto the original text at the same time shifts objective characteristics back to the subject. Then, the aesthetic object (original work) causes certain internal resonance of the subject (translator), which makes the object and self permeates into each other to become one entity. At last, through the detailed analysis and illustrations from six different aspects, it can't be hard for us to find out that the translation of Professor Zhang Peiji successfully reproduces the aesthetic value of the original text. The discussion is from a relatively new angle of essay translation, even though a lot of work needs to be done for further researches...