On Aesthetic Representation Of Yang Xianyi’s English Translation Of The Poems In A Dream Of Red Mansions

Since aesthetic judgment has a close relationship with language function in Chinese,aesthetics has played a significant role in Chinese translation theory all the time. Many translators have made great contributions to the Chinese translation aesthetics theory generation after generation, promoting the combination of aesthetics and translation.Among them, one of the most outstanding representatives is Professor Liu Miqing, who has promoted the development of modern Chinese translation aesthetics theory by uniting Chinese traditional aesthetic theory with translation. According to his theory, literary translation is an art of language representation which is closely associated with aesthetics.Literary translation needs to reproduce the beauty of the original works with the target language and it is the process of aesthetic representation and aesthetic experience. All the aesthetic activities mainly contain four steps: aesthetic comprehension, aesthetic transformation, aesthetic improvement and aesthetic representation. Aesthetic representation is the necessary step to realize the aesthetic activities. Aesthetic representation in literary translation requires the translators to have a good knowledge and high appreciation of both texts concerned and then to convey the aesthetic factors into the target text, which tests the translators’ translation competence.This thesis begins with an overview of the study of translation aesthetics and makes a discussion of aesthetic representation of Yang Xianyi’s English translation of the poems in A Dream of Red Mansions according to Liu Miqing’s translation aesthetics theory. The discussion is carried out mainly on two levels: formal aesthetic system and non-formal aesthetic system. The formal aesthetic system can be described as the collection of aesthetic forms, in which the readers can feel the beauty by the material aesthetic constituents such as sound, word, sentence and passage. The non-formal aesthetic system,also called the sets of fuzziness in which aesthetic information exists in the wholeness and the non-material aesthetic constituents, are image, symbol, sentiment and ideal.In terms of A Dream of Red Mansions, after doing a contrastive analysis between the the original text and its translation text, the author of this thesis finds that the translator Yang Xianyi has reproduced the aesthetic values of the source text successfully. He could not have achieved all of this without his comprehensive and profound knowledge of both languages and cultures. Yang’s successful reproduction of the charm and beauty of classical Chinese poetry has made A Dream of Red Mansions a model of poetry translation.