On The English Translation Of Tang Poetry From The Memetic Perspective

Memetics illustrates the universal relationship between things from diachronic andsynchronic point of view, and proposes the inheritance of culture. Whether the cultureinformation is correctly translated and accepted by TL people is a criterion of the success oftranslation. The memetic theory enables us to analyze translation process from the viewpointof meme’s transmission.This thesis analyzes the translation process of Tang poetry and strategies that translatorsadopt from a memetic approach. From the viewpoint of source language, translation isintroducing alien memes by language vector, thus ensuring the progress of their culture. Fromthe viewpoint target language, translation is a replication and transmission process. Theaccuracy, stability and transmission speed of replication of the target language meme is theguarantee of its survival in the new culture.The translation process of Tang poetry is a process of transmitting language memes toEnglish speaking countries. In this process, the poets combined their intentional meme andsocio-cultural meme and placed them in the source language texts, which are poems, and thenthe translator receives and decodes these memes to understand the writer’s intention andcultural background. After that, the translator put his own understanding of these memes inthe target language texts by translation, and then the target language readers will receive thesememes. Therefore, applying of Memetics to the analysis of Tang poetry translation can greatlyhelps to find the more suitable strategies to convey the faithfulness by comparing somewell-known translation versions. The author introduces two translation strategies to deal withthe cultural memes in Tang poetry: domesticating translation and foreignizing translation, andthen discusses the relationship between these two translation strategies and the transmissionof memes from the perspective of Memetics. Furthermore, the author studies the applicationof these two translation strategies in the translation of cultural memes in Tang poetry. Wemake a conclusion that both domesticating translation and foreignizing translation plays important roles in translation of Tang poetry by making a comparison of different versions ofthe translation of Tang poetry. Domesticating translation is the necessary means at the earlystage of memes’ transmission and foreignizing translation is the inevitable requirement andtrend for memes’ further transmission.