A Comparative Study Of The Epigram Translation In Four Chinese Versions Of The History Of Rasselas, Prince Of Abyssinia

The thesis studies the English epigram translation in Samuel Johnson’s novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia on the basis of Peter Newmark’s translation theory of semantic translation and communicative translation which are the cores of his translation theory. ST refers to within the bare syntactic and semantic constraints of the TL, the translator attempts to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the author; while CT means that the translator attempts to produce the same effect on the TL readers as was produced by the original on the SL readers. Their foucus are different. ST pays attention to the original language structure and the author’s idea; whereas CT focuses on the effect produced by TL and the response of the TL readers. The theory of ST and CT provides a new perspective and direction for the research of translation theory and practice.There are four Chinese versions so far, translated separately by Wang Zengcheng in the year of2000, Zheng Yali in2003, Cai Tianming in2006and Chen Xijun in2012. Through the collection and study of the epigrams in the novel, the thesis has collected87pieces of epigrams and their counterpart versions in four Chinese translations, and builds a small English-Chinese parallel corpus. The research will pay attention to the analysis and study of the epigram translation in the four Chinese versions through corpus statistics and comparative analysis methods.From the perspective of Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation theory, the research compares and analyzes the epigram translation methods and skills. The thesis finds that in the four versions, Wang’s version is the one that are most close to ST, even word-to-word translation. His version has some semantic deviation and many grammatical and semantic mistakes; secondly, Cai Tianming’s version is also much closer to ST and it also has some semantic deviations. However, compared with Wang’s version, the language in his version is more fluent and meaning is more accurate; Zheng Yali adopts CT and uses many Chinese idioms, but some epigram translations are over translated. Last, Chen’s version combines ST and CT and the meaning is relatively accurate and fluent. As a result, the research has found that for the epigram translation, the use of ST or CT alone can not effect well. The best way is to combine the two methods together. Only in this way can the epigram translation be more significant in practice and guidance of translation.