On Reproduction Of Text Functions

As the essence of Chinese Culture, Tang poetry has been translated into Englishby lots of translators both at home and abroad and a large number of translatedversions have been published. Among the numerous translators, Xu Yuanchong isregarded as a great master of English translation of classical Chinese poetry. He hastranslated plenty of ancient Chinese poetry, and made great achievement on bothtranslation theory and translation practice. Based on his translation practice, he hasproposed systematic translation theories on Chinese poetry translation, such as the“Three Beauties” theory, the “Three Resemblances” theory, the “Three Methods”theory, the “Triple Purpose” theory, the “Three Situations” theory, the “Theory ofRivalry”, and so on. Many scholars have done in-depth researches on Xu’s translationtheories, aspect of translator, the reproduction of Aesthetic function, etc. Theseresearches are based on a variety of perspectives, such as Aesthetics, Functionalequivalence, subjectivity and Skopos theories, etc. However, few scholars have donetheir study on Xu’s Tang Poetry translation to analyze how Xu’s translation worksreproduce the text functions of the source text from the perspective of Text Functionstheory.German Functionalist Buhler puts forward his “Organon model” of languagefunctions. And based on this model, Reiss, Newmark and Snell-Hornby all developtheir Text functions and Text-types theories. Newmark classifies texts into“expressive text”,“informative text” and “vocative text”. And normally, a textincludes more than one language functions.After reviewing on theories of language functions and text functions thatproposed by related translators, this thesis sets Newmark’s Text Functions theory astheoretical foundation, and under the three classifications of Expressive Text,Informative Text and Vocative Text, takes the main function as priority, then selectsproper poems translated by Xu Yuanchong as research objects. In the thesis, theauthor discusses the translation strategies adopted by Xu for the purpose ofreproducing the text function of the original poem in image, rhythm, narrative person,sentence structure and so on. However, the same as other texts, Tang Poetry alsoincludes multiple functions, which is a kind of literary work with high aestheticfeature. In the subsequent step, the author further analyzes the dynamic reproduction of Text Functions, by illustrating more poems. According to the case study in ChapterFour, the author finds that by flexible choosing of translation strategies, Xu’stranslation of Tang Poetry can successfully reproduce the language function andaesthetic function of the original poems.It is a tentative study on Xu Yuanchong’s Tang Poetry from the perspective ofNewmark’s Text Functions theory, which paves a new way for studying Xu’translated works and sets a good example for studying Xu’s other literary translatedworks.