Aesthetic Representation Of Traditional Chinese Poetry Translation Under The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

In traditional Chinese poems, there exists the special beauty in sound, characters, lines as well as the beauty that exhibits the poets’emotions or ambitions, and the poems’ images, artistic conceptions and symbolism. All these different kinds of aesthetic information originate from traditional Chinese philosophy-aesthetics. And they are an artistically-processed miniature of Chinese culture. Out of the point of Sino-western cultural communication and integration, translators should explore the beauty of the SL and represent it in the TL in an aesthetic way.Traditional Chinese translation studies are closely related to philosophy-aesthetics, however the methodology employed in it, just as its prepositions, carries a heavy color of fuzziness and impressiveness. It cannot be used to study translation in a scientific and systematic way. Different from the case in China, translation studies in the West turned to etymology, historic comparative linguistics from aesthetics early in the mid-17th century and up till the mid-20th century when linguistics became the prevailing discipline that guided the translation studies in the West. The characteristics of being scientific and systematic is what’s missing in Chinese translation aesthetics.Based on the difference between the East and the West, the thesis takes such a translation strategy:To explore the beauty of the traditional Chinese poetry (It mainly refers to those regulated verses and quatrains after the Tang Dynasty, with itself included) from the perspective of Chinese Literature and Art aesthetics; to represent it in the western representation ways (Dynamic Imitation&Empathy). Only in this way could the the beauty of the original poem be represented in the TL to its biggest extent.According to Prof. Liu Miqing’s classification of the beauty of literary works and their translation principles, the thesis proposes its own classification of traditional Chinese poems and the corresponding representation principles. It is also emphasized in the thesis that the aesthetic representation of the internal and comprehensive beauty of the SL is much more important than that of the external beauty, and it cannot be easily done through simple imitation. Translators should make full use of empathy to achieve a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the beauty of the SL.Meanwhile, it should be realized that Chinese-English translation is between two heterogeneous languages and cultures, some aesthetic information cannot be fully transferred into the TL because of the linguistic or cultural heterogeneities, which makes translation an art that is full of regrets, while it should be realized too that it is heterogeneity that makes the human culture splendid, and it is the general cognition among human beings behind heterogeneity that makes translation possible. Cultural communication and integration are the mainstream nowadays, and they not only motivate translation but also constitute the value of it at the same time.