The Representation Of "Triple Beauty" In Xu Yuanchong’s English Translation Of Tang Poetry: From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

Tang poetry, as a gem of the traditional culture and art of China, shines in theworld cultural treasure as well. It has been widely intoned and passed on by peopleover one thousand years for its extensive subject matter, various artistic style, andbeautiful metrical scheme. The translation of Tang poetry is not only an important partof the spread of Chinese culture but also a medium of culture communication betweenChina and foreign countries. However, with the profound cultural connotations,aesthetic artistic conception and strict arrangement in meter and rhyme, translation ofTang poetry is not an easy job, about which many scholars have once sighed “It’salready difficult to compose a poem, let alone to translate it”. Xu Yuanchong, afamous translator in modern China, has profound attainments in literary translationespecially in the translation of classical Chinese verse. He insists on translating Tangpoems in rhymed English, and advocates the principle of “Triple Beauty”, that is, toconvey the original beauty in sense, in sound and in form, among which the beauty insense is the most important.Schema theory that originated from the cognitive psychology explains howhuman beings absorb, reconstruct and form the information in mind for understandingof the outside knowledge. It has showed that in the process of the comprehension,people should decode the content schemata, language schemata and formal schematain the original properly, and the principle put forward by Xu Yuanchong ofreproducing the beauty in sense, beauty in sound and beauty in form while translatingpoems just coincides to it.This thesis attempts to apply the schema theory to the study of Englishtranslation of Tang poetry by Xu Yuanchong. It mainly proceeds from followingaspects: firstly, the reasonability of applying the schema theory to the translationstudy is analyzed, which provides the theoretical bases for the follow-up study ofapplying schema theory to the translation of Tang poetry. Secondly, the contentschema, language schema and formal schema in Tang poetry are expounded, whichare respectively “beauty in sense” corresponding to image and culture,“beauty in sound” to rhyme and rhythm, and “beauty in form” to sentence length and antithesisin Tang poetry. In the meantime, it demonstrates whether these schemata have beensuccessfully translated by Xu Yuanchong to achieve the representation of “TripleBeauty” in the original. Thirdly, it concludes the schema conflict and default whichmay be met with in Tang poetry translation and summarizes the correspondingtranslation strategies by Xu Yuanchong such as preserving, adjusting and omitting theoriginal schema, through probing the process of representation of “Triple Beauty” inhis translation. Combining the schema with “Triple Beauty”, this paper confirms thatthe schemata in original poems have been appreciated in translation by Xu Yuanchong,and he has tried different ways of overcoming the schema difficulties in translating toreproduce the “Triple Beauty” of the original. It also tries to verify the feasibility andpractical effects of applying the schema theory to English translation of Tang poetryby Xu Yuanchong, by evaluating it from the new theoretical perspective comparedwith the previous study. It is hoped that this paper will give a more scientific methodand open a wider theoretical view to the study of Xu Yuanchong’s translation theoryand practice under the guidance of interdisciplinary theory.