A Comparative Study Of English Translation Of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry

Ci-poetry is not only the essence of ancient Chinese culture and the wonderful accumulation during the long Chinese history, but also a sparkling pearl in world literary history. Li Qingzhao, who was acclaimed as an outstanding poetess in Chinese literary history, played a significant role with her unique style and enjoyed great esteem and reputation at home and abroad.In the age of globalization, more and more foreigners become fascinated by classical Chinese Ci-poetry. As the translation of Ci-poetry is an effective means to introduce Chinese culture to the foreign countries and bridge different cultures, a great number of excellent translators and translation theoreticians feel obliged to contribute to this cause and a multitude of translations come into existence. Among them, some translators began to do research and translation on Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry and made indelible contribution to development of English translation of Li's Ci-poetry. Thus lots of Ci-poems have been translated into English or other languages and at the same time painstaking efforts have been made on various aspects to explain the theory of translation on Ci-poetry.For obtaining a comprehensive study of her existing poetry, this thesis analyzes a great number of translation versions on Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry by comparative study. It introduces concepts of"fore-understanding"and"effective history"in hermeneutics, and applies the theories to provide a foundation for the research. Supported by the theory of Hermeneutics it intends to probe into different translation versions of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry at five levels: translation of reduplicative words, image, colloquial words, special words and allusions.By means of analyzing, this thesis attempts to conduct research not only in terms of practice, but also in terms of theory, not only on individual Ci-poem but also on general characteristics of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry. It is attempting to work out effective translation strategies and if possible a theoretical framework in this field. This thesis will be analyzed mainly by contrastive analysis and comparative analysis. Meanwhile, macro and micro analysis will also be applied in the detailed analysis of different translation versions. Besides, the methods, such as classification and categorization, will be utilized in this research.Although there are some researches on translation of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry at home and abroad from various perspectives, few targeted at an overview of Li's Ci-poetry's translation and hardly any is studied from the perspective of hermeneutics. By analyzing different versions of translation, this thesis intends to put forward effective translation strategies of Ci-poetry in hope of facilitating relevant translators and enabling more people to appreciate ancient Chinese culture which we are so proud of.Over the years, a great number of scholars and researchers have contributed greatly to this field, but a lot of problems remained unsolved and there is large room for innovation.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is introduction which consists of background, aim, significance and structure of the research. Chapter two deals with literature review, including overview of studies on translation of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry at home and abroad. Chapter three expounds on the theory of hermeneutics, introducing its definition, origin and development, exploring the significant concepts of fore-understanding, prejudice, effective history and the relation between hermeneutics, language and culture. Chapter four expounds on comparative analysis on different translation versions of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry on four levels, which are reduplicative words, cultural imagery, colloquial words, special words and allusions, and meanwhile explores some effective strategies for translation of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry. Chapter five comes to a conclusion. The author summarizes the whole paper and also reveals the deficiencies.