A Degree Of Freedom: Thought On Principles Of Poetry Translation

Since the beginning of translation, the issue about poetry translation has been an essential part of translation research. The issue of poetry translation is an age-old topic and it sparked much interest and curiosity for many scholars and translators at home and abroad. Translation involves in three elements:the original text (OT). the translator and the target text (TT). In traditional translation studies, researchers just paid attention to the translation skills and compassion between the OT and the TT, but the natural equivalence between the OT and the TT, and the subjectivity of translator is not sufficiently emphasized. Functional equivalence approach to translation aims to reproduce the intention of the original text in the translation, rather than reproducing the actual words of the original. And it asks for translator to find the closest natural equivalence to the original text. Inspired on this theory. I will take one of Li Bai’s poems as a case, and comparatively analyze the ten different translations, with the purpose of showing how this theory can work as a useful tool to translators of poetry so that the task of translating poetry can be made easier.Structurally, the present thesis consists of four chapters and the conclusion. Chapter One is a literature review about some theories and studies in poetry translation at home and abroad. Chapter Two will be devoted to introducing poetry from three aspects:definition, features and functions. For the functions of poetry, this chapter will explain it from four levels: information, society, culture, and aesthetics. Chapter Three is committed to explaining the functional equivalence theory, which serves as the theoretical preparation for the coming analysis between the ten translated versions in Chapter Four and is described in three facts: development, dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence, and feasibility of functional equivalence in poetry translation. Chapter Four conducts a detailed contrastive analysis on the ten translated versions of one of Li Bai’s poems from the perspective of functional equivalence theory. In this part, there will first be a brief introduction about the poet Li Bai. and the characteristics of his poetry, and then the analysis of the translated versions from two angles:meaningful and aesthetic equivalent. Through analyzing, I point out that poetry is a special literary text, and poetry translation is a kind of art and re-creation. Therefore, translator of poetry has more subjectivity and freedom than translator of other literary texts. But this subjectivity and freedom has a degree, because the translator must still be faithful to the original.