A Comparative Study On Translation Of Mao Zedong's Poetry From Eco-translatology Perspective

Mao Zedong's poetry is a treasure of Chinese classical poetry.It adopts the metrical form and carries abundant cultural connotations in content.With the use of various rhetorical devices,allusions and images,it shows highly artistic value.Beside,Mao Zedong's poetry reflects the course of Chinese revolution and embodies Mao's great thoughts,and thus is of political significance.Eco-translatology theory is put forward and developed the Chinese scholar Hu Gengshen.Hu gains inspirations from both Darwin's evolution theory and Chinese ancient ecological wisdom such as "Unity of people and nature".The theory is an ecological approach for translation studies.Till now,studies on the translation of Mao Zedong's poetry from Eco-translatology theory are still relatively rare.This thesis adopts eco-translatology theory as theoretical basis to make a comparative study between five English versions of Mao Zedong's poetry.These versions include the official version in 1976,Barnstone's version,Xu Yuanchong's version in1993,Gu Zhengkun's version in 1993 and Huang Long's version in 1993.In the analysis part,the comparative study is made from two aspects.One is the translational eco-environments of different versions and how translators adapted to them.The other aspect focuses on using multi-dimensional transformation theory to investigate how different translators made transformation in linguistic dimension,cultural dimension and communicative dimension.Rhyme and vocabulary mainly account for linguistic dimension,while allusion and tune name account for Cultural dimension.As to communicative dimension,several typical examples are analyzed in detail for further explanation.After comprehensive analysis,we may draw the following conclusions:In linguistic dimension,Xu Yuanchong's version exhibits the highest degree of adaptation in terms of rhyme,for it not only adopts end rhyme which is shown in original poetry,but also uses alliteration and internal rhyme as supplement.And Huang Long's version is the one with the lowest degree of adaptation among the five versions as far as vocabulary is concerned.Because Latin words,formal and old English words appeared in his translation may cause comprehension barriers for target readers.In cultural dimension,the omission translation strategy will make certain information in the original poetry unseen in the target text and should thus be avoided as much as possible.Using transliteration strategy to translate cultural-loaded words or expressions,the degree of target texts' adaptation to source text is relatively low.Translations using transliteration with internal notes,free translation and replacement strategies can better convey the cultural connotation embodied in the original poetry and enjoys the highest degree of adaptation.In communicative dimension,Xu Yuanchong's translations of several examples all effectively express the communicative intentions of original poetry and show the highest degree of adaptation.Translations in other versions are good in some example,but not satisfying in others.The most noticeable version is Bamstone's version.As Barnstone lives in America,he is lacking in knowledge about Chinese history and culture compared with other Chinese native translators.Therefore,there are some mistranslations of words or expressions in related to Chinese culture.And the degree of adaptation of his translation is relatively low in terms of communicative meanings.