A Study Of Translatability Of Beauty In Language From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

On the whole, the beauty in language is apparently culture-bounded, so the transference of aesthetic elements in one language to the other is limited by several impediments, including language structures, aesthetic psychology and aesthetic representation. Because of those impediments, the inter-language transformation of beauty is painstaking or even a visionary hope. Therefore, translation aesthetics has to deal with the feasibility to reproduce aesthetic elements in translation aesthetic object, namely the translatability of beauty in language. However, through a comprehensive review of the research of translation aesthetics in recent years, it shows that few studies focus on the matter of translatability of language beauty and they need specific and further investigations.The paper probes into the translatability of beauty in language from the perspectives of phonology, lexicology, syntax, style and culture with the guidance of translation aesthetics along with the achievements of stylistics, rhetoric, linguistics and cross-cultural communication studies. Meanwhile in accordance with the custom of aesthetic judgment, the paper tries best to explore the methodology and approaches to represent beauty in target text to the max. Jing Hua Yuan is a representative erudite novel in Qing Dynasty, which enjoys the fame of encyclopedic information and can be called the treasury of Chinese classic culture. Meanwhile its English rendition translated by Lin Tai-yi is natural and idiomatic in expression, which can offer abundant examples to the study on translatability of beauty in language. By systematic analyses and reasoning, the research reveals that the translatability of beauty in language differs on different language levels. Aesthetic elements which take up lower position in hierarchy of a language are more often than not chained by language forms tightly and rather difficult to translate from the perspective of translation aesthetics, some of them are even not translatable, such as onomatopoeia, rhyme, lexical form, collocation, syntactic deviation and frequence. However, as the position that aesthetic elements hold in language raises, their translatability enhances accordingly. The translation of style and culture could justify the conclusion.