A Study Of Translating Wang Wei’s Poems Into English From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Wang Wei, whose poetry occupies an important status in classical Chinese poetry, is one of the most influential poets in China’s Tang Dynasty in particular and classical Chinese poetry in general. Many famous translators and sinologists take part in translating classical Chinese poems, bringing out many distinctive translation works with strong influence. Under the translation boom of classical Chinese poetry, Wang Wei’s poetry therewith came into the sight of Chinese and western translators with its particular artistic style and literary value. However, due to the great differences between Chinese and English language, translators are required to balance several aspects in the process of translation like rhyme, artistic conception, cultural specificity, and the context of target readers, leading to inevitable cultural loss in translation. Moreover, acclaimed as "poetry Buddha", Wang Wei shows strong Zen thoughts in his poems, making them obscurer for western readers because of their indirect emotional expression through images or scenery description. This also increase the difficulty for translators to infer his intention from the original poems and transfer it to the target audience.Therefore, to deal with the aforementioned difficulties, this thesis aims to explore a way to guide the translation of Wang Wei’s poetry based on relevance theory. According to relevance theory, the translator is suggested to pursue optimal relevance, where the target audience could spend the least processing effort to maximally understand and enjoy the intention from the original text through interpretative resemblance. Generally speaking, relevance theory has a guidance value for translating Wang Wei’s poetry, especially in offering a standard for translators to balance between different artistic aspects during the translation.The thesis first reviews the translation studies on Wang Wei’s poetry with summarizing the research status and related achievements in this area as guidance and reference for the thesis. Then it introduces relevance theory as the theoretical framework of the whole thesis, in which the basic conceptions and contents of relevance theory are introduced and analyzed; meanwhile, the feasibility of applying the theory to the translation studies of classical Chinese poetry is discussed as a foundation for the following analysis. Furthermore, the thesis introduces the poetic features of Wang Wei and his life experience, and then combs the history of his poetry in translation. Last but not least, the thesis carries out an in-depth analysis on translation of Wang Wei’s poetry from the perspective of relevance theory, which is also the core part of the whole thesis. The translated versions of Wang Wei’s several representative poems like Mountain Zhongnan, Green Brook, Bird Calling Valley, are analyzed in terms of rhyme, artistic conception, and culture-specific words. In this process, the thesis tries to find a way to reach optimal relevance in translation of Wang Wei’s poetry in order to maximally help the target audience access to the artistic charm of Wang Wei’s poetry.