A Study On Zhang Peiji’s English Version Of Autumn In Peiping From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

In a narrow sense, prose is a literary genre which is together with novel, poetry, drama. The main characteristics of prose are the free form and tight spirit."Free" form refers to the informal form of prose; tight spirit refers to the clear subject of the prose. A lot of outstanding essayists in our country create a large number of excellent works of prose. However, so far, the research on Chinese prose translation study is far from enough, to say nothing of the research on the translation of modern Chinese prose from the perspective of translation aesthetics. The study of Chinese prose translation has lagged behind the study of other literary genre. The emergence and development of aesthetics have offered a great help to translation, especially to literary translation studies. Aesthetics is a subject studying people’s feelings towards beauty, and the translation aesthetics is the combination of aesthetics and translation studies, which has been attracting the attentions of the translation scholars and researchers. If translator wants to use another word to express the original meaning, the translator’s aesthetic consciousness and awareness are particularly important. The author of present thesis holds that the modern prose translation study cannot be separated from aesthetics, since the most typical characteristic of prose is loose in form but focused in soul, in other words, the prose in the final analysis is the beauty of wholeness.The characteristics of prose determine that a good translation of an essay should be the combination of form and soul, which can be well approached from the perspective of aesthetics. On the basis of the translation aesthetics theory proposed by Liu Miqing’s theory in aesthetic subject, aesthetic object, aesthetic representation and aesthetic criteria, this thesis appreciates and analyzes Zhang Peiji’s translation strategies in translating Autumn in Peiping. The author tries to conduct a relatively in-depth analysis on how the translated essay reproduces the aesthetic values of the original from various levels like phonetic level, lexical level, syntactic level, artistic conception and culture level so as to expound and prove the necessity of translation aesthetics for prose translation.The present thesis provides a new perspective (i.e. the aesthetic perspective) to the study of modern Chinese essays. At the same time, it also proves the feasibility and the value of translation aesthetic theory raised by Liu Miqing in the research of the translation of modern Chinese prose. The paper concludes with certainty that translation aesthetics should permeate all facets of prose translation. Translators are supposed to take aesthetic flavor into consideration and to appropriately employ Liu Miqing’s translation aesthetic theories so as to represent aesthetic flavor intended in the original prose. Moreover, translators are expected to fully understand the aesthetic cognitive processes in translation and consciously foster their own aesthetic qualifications, with the hope that prose translation might be substantially improved. It is hoped that the present thesis will be of some help to the theoretical study and practical work of the translation of modern Chinese prose.