Embodiment Of "Optimum" In E-C Literary Translation

English and Chinese are widely used in the world. English-Chinese translation plays an important role in cultural communication. Thus proper English-Chinese translation theory is essential. Xu Yuanchong’s optimizing theory provides a good guidance for English-Chinese literary translation. This thesis studies Xu Yuanchong’s optimizing theory in translation from three aspects. First, it analyses the difference between English and Chinese as manifested in hypotaxis versus parataxis and concludes that the optimizing theory is feasible. Then it discusses optimizing strategy in E-C literary translation, which includes means of deepening and generalizing. Finally, it explains some methods to make full use of the good idiomatic expressions of the target language.