On The Actualization Of The Aesthetic Motivations In Translating Poems By Mao Zedong From The Semiotic Perspective

Mao Zedong is not only the leader of the People’s Republic of China but also a talented poet in modern China. Mao Zedong’s poems are well-known for their rich ideas, heroic spirit and everlasting artistic charm. There have been abundant studies of his poems and the translated versions. However, semiotic approaches to the studies of translation have been rarely made.Language is the most important kind of sign system while semiotics provides a comprehensive system to analyze signs, thus semiotics is of great significance to translation studies, including poem translation studies. This thesis will apply semiotics approach to analyze Mao Zedong’s poems translated by Xu Yuanchong from three aspects, namely, phonological motivation, syntactic motivation and semantic motivation. It is the aim of this thesis to analyze the realization of aesthetic motivation in the translation of Mao Zedong’s poems.In the study of semantic motivation, semiotics is taken as a powerful analytical tool. And in the study of phonological motivation and syntactic motivation, the semiotic rationale and theoretical perspective is applied. The research result shows that Xu Yuanchong evaluates different approaches to achieve the best possible effect. Phonological motivation, syntactic motivation and semantic motivation are all realized to a large extent in his translation, so his translation is successful in the actualization of aesthetic motivation on the whole. The degree of the realization of semantic motivation is the highest among the three while the degree of syntactic motivation is the lowest. The research result shows that Xu Yuanchong has strictly followed his translation theory of "beauty in sense, in sound and in form" in his translation practice...