C-to-E Translation Of The Tang Poetry And The Song Ci Viewed From Metaphorical Perspective

China is the homeland of poems with a long history of poetry. The classic Chinese poetry, imbued with the information of Chinese culture, is the important part of Chinese culture. The Tang Poetry and the Song Ci are two glittering gems throughout ages in the history of Chinese poetry. We can enjoy reading them with great pleasure even nowadays in their artistic flavor. This dissertation attempts to make a research on the problems of C-to-E translation of the Tang Poetry and the Song Ci from the perspective of metaphors.The poets of the Tang Poetry and the Song Ci usually expressed their feeling and aspirations through metaphors or images relevant to some objects or embodiment. More than 2000 years ago, metaphors were the language phenomena that attracted the major concern of the linguists. The traditional concepts have it that metaphors are just rhetoric ornaments or decoration of language. With the study of metaphors in an ever far-reaching way in recent decades, people's notions about metaphors have changed a lot. Metaphors and their structure, function, operational mechanism and cognitive characteristics have become heated topics in the fields of linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, anthropology and philosophy. Within these disciplines, the study of the cognition of metaphors function has made a breakthrough. The orientation of such study is something innovative and it is accepted generally in the academic field. The cognitive linguists have their own new explanations of metaphors. They hold that metaphors are not only rhetoric means but also an important vehicle for people to know the outside world, a vehicle by which people can effectively come to understand what is abstract through what is concrete. Images that belong to the category of metaphors are the "soul" of poems. The images are usually represented in the poetic metaphors. An image stands for the smallest unit for aesthetics in a poem. A variety of images combined in a poem produces a certain effect, a poetic mood. An image has the features of vagueness and symbolism, and an image with these features can leave readers a large room for further imagination and association. So, it is safe to say that translating a poem means translating the images it bears. It is advisable to adopt Xu Yuanzhong's "Three Beauties" doctrine when we translate the Tang Poetry and the Song Ci, or in other words, we should stick to the principle that Xu Yuanzhong has put forward, which is termed as "beauty in sense, sound and form", and which is, to a certain extent, a standard for a rather hit-home evaluation of the quality of the version of a poem.Generally speaking, poems are translatable. But in translating the Tang Poetry and the Song Ci, the differences in languages and cultures between the East and the West will throw a translator into great difficulties, especially in the aspects of how to express the original metaphors and how to convey the original images. It is beyond doubt that the translator's scholarship, aesthetic orientation and proficiency both in Chinese and English will affect the quality of rendition. In doing such translation, a translator should bring into full play his or her initiative and his or her subjective role in the translating of metaphors or images and in the process of aesthetics. Actually, the translating of the Tang Poetry and the Song Ci is also a kind of cross-cultural communication. The western culture, as a major culture in the world at present, will inevitably take a posture of threat and infiltration to the Chinese culture. Therefore, a translator of the Tang Poetry and the Song Ci should adopt the strategy of" foreignization as the principal choice with domestication as its aid wherever necessary" so as to make the Chinese culture well-known to the world and resist the hegemony of the western culture.In this dissertation, the study of C-to-E Translation of the Tang Poetry and the Song Ci is conducted in the horizon of metaphors with Xu Yuanzhong's "Three Beauties" doctrine as the major theoretic support. What is presented in this paper is in a certain sense an overall interpretation of why C-to-E Translation of the Tang Poetry and the Song Ci should have "foreignization" as its principal strategy and "Three Beauties" doctrine as its evaluation orientation of rendition quality by means of analysis of the typical translation models and contemplation in the theoretic issues in a philosophical way.