Between Naturalization And Barbarization-a Comparative Study Of Two English Translations Of Wang Wei’s Wangchuan Ji

Wang Wei, one of the greatest poets in the Tang Dynasty, is a prodigy in poetry,music, and painting. Praised as “poems in formless painting”, his landscape poems,especially those twenty pieces in Wangchuan Ji, reveal the artistic achievement of agreat poet, attracting many translators. Since its introduction into theEnglish-speaking world, Wangchuan Ji’s popularity has been proved by a variety oftranslated versions in the West, which calls for a relatively in-depth comparativestudy.With James Liu’s naturalization and barbarization theory as the theoreticalframework, this thesis investigates Pauline Yu’s and Stephen Owen’s translations ofWangchuan Ji from both microscopic and macroscopic perspectives in terms ofdiction, grammar, versification, allusions, and images, attempting to explore thereasons behind similarities and differences.Detailed analysis of the two translations reveals that the two versions present ageneral scene of barbarization, given that both Yu and Owen pertain to the camp ofcritic-translators. Yet there are still a number of differences, owning to the differentmethods employed by the translators. By and large, Yu’s version inclines towardsbarbarization while Owen to naturalization. The two tendencies, however, are notabsolutely exclusive. In some places of the translations, Yu attempts to provide anaturalized version, and Owen resorts to barbarization to make his version soundexotic. Hence, their versions of Wangchuan Ji are neither entirely barbarization nornaturalization to the end, but somewhere between the two polarities.The similarities and differences in the two translations are attributable to the twotranslators’ academic backgrounds, cultural identities, personal aesthetics, andintended readers. As a native speaker of Chinese, Yu has certain advantages inChinese language and culture, which contributes to her barbarization by generating aversion close to the original for her academic readers and oncoming translators ofclassical Chinese poems. Owen, whose native language is English, however, has to overcome his disadvantages in Chinese language and culture by turning tonaturalization to produce a version more natural and familiar to his general Englishreaders and university students.