A Study Of The Translation Of Characters’ Names In The English Version Of Journey To The West

With supernatural beings as its protagonists, Xi You Ji（XYJ） creates a world offantasy and illusion, which is a famous mystery novel in China. In the novel, there area huge number of characters, which are not only active and vivid, but also named withdifferent reasons and features. Their variety and vividness reflect artistic attractionand literary beauty of the novel. So the translation of characters’ names plays animportant role in representing the beauty of the original text, which is not ignored.The intermarriage between translation and aesthetics is characterized by Chinesetranslation theories. As translation aesthetics is developing, its conception, theoryclassification and elaboration tend to be more reasonable and scientific. More andmore researchers focus on how to make translation aesthetics into translating activity.And Xi You Ji, with rich aesthetic value, is a treasure in Chinese literature. But thestudy of aesthetic translation on its English versions is rare.On the basis of translation aesthetics, this paper makes a study of the translationof characters’ names in Jenner’s English version of Journey to the West. In the processof writing the paper, the characters’ names are all collected and made into a list. Thepaper will select some typical translating examples to discuss their translationmethods, and then analyze how the translator successfully achieves the translationaesthetic representation. After conclusion and analysis, this paper finds out the maintranslation methods adopted by Jenner: transliteration, literal translation, freetranslation, omitting, adding and multiple-translation method. And he mainly usesmeans of dynamic imitation in the translation aesthetic representation. Consequentlyhe successfully represents the original beauty, namely the beauty in sound,conciseness, consistency, rhetoric, eeriness, wildness and solemnity.Translation Methods of characters’ names in Journey to the West give much goodguidance for translating names in literary works. The translator’s quality Jennerreflects in his English version as well as his great effort of represent the originalbeauty are needed to study to many translation learners.