A Contrastive Study Of The Three Complete English Versions Of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poems From The Perspective Of Communicative And Semantic Translation Theory

In the long Chinese history for thousands of years,the poetic culture can go back to the ancient times.It starts with the first Chinese poetry collection Book of Poetry eulogizing Chinese ancestors' life between the Western Zhou Dynasty and the Spring and Autumn Period,further develops in Yuefu Poetry of the Han Dynasty,and reaches its peak in the poetry of the Tang Dynasty.The Song Ci-poetry is another climax in the history of the Chinese poetry.Both the Tang Poetry and Song Ci-poetry have a great influence on the Chinese poetic culture.As an outstanding poetess in the field of ancient Chinese poetry,Li Qingzhao has a rough precarious life with her fresh,beautiful,and graceful poetic style in Song Ci-poetry,which not only shocks the poetry field of the Song Dynasty,making her excellent representative of the “Graceful and Restrained School”,but also attracts many scholars and poetry lovers at home and abroad to conduct research on her and her Ci-poems and to translate her Ci-poems.However,the previous studies mostly focus on Li Qingzhao's Cipoems from the aspects of aesthetics,feminism,function,culture,etc.Furthermore,most of the researchers analyze several translated texts of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poems,which lacks comprehensiveness and systematicness.In the 1980's,in his work Approaches to Translation(2001),Peter Newmark proposes two types of translation: communicative translation(CT)and semantic translation(ST),namely,communicative and semantic translation theory(CST)according to the functions of language—informative function,expressive function,and vocative function.In CT,the translator aims to produce the same effect on the target language(TL)readers as is produced by the original on the source language(SL)readers,and the emphasis is laid on the conveying the message of the original in a form,which conforms to linguistic,cultural and pragmatic conventions of TL.Both content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readers.While in ST,the translator attempts to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the SL within the bare syntactic and semantic constraints of the TL.In addition,Newmark suggests the correlation between his translation methods and text type.In general,the CT is used to translate the non-literary texts such as advertisements,notice,poster,etc.,and yet ST is employed for the expressive texts,whose form can be literary,scientific document,and other types of texts which aim to highlight the language and content of the source text.However,the distinction between CT and ST used in different text types is not absolutely fossilized.Though CT is used for informative and vocative texts and ST is for expressive ones,different translation methods and criteria should be adopted accordingly,for few texts are purely expressive,informative,or vocative.Li Qingzhao's Ci-poetry,which belongs to the Graceful and Restrained School,a genre of Song Ci-poetry,emphasizes expressive function and vocative function and which has struck a responsive chord in the hearts of the readers.So in translating Li Qingzhao's Ci-poems,the translator will treat them more or less communicatively or more or less semantically or both at the same time.Based on characteristics of Song Ci-poetry and Li Qingzhao's graceful and restrained Cipoems,this dissertation,from the perspective of CST theory,will probe into the three complete English versions of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poems respectively translated by the Chinese mainland translator Xu Yuanchong,Chinese Taiwan translator Hu Pinqing,and American poets Kenneth Rexroth & Zhong Ling,adopting data statistics and contrastive analysis.This dissertation aims to explore the translation difficulties in Li Qingzhao's Ci-poems,find out the similarities and differences among their translation methods and the differences in the translation effects,and reveal the merits and demerits of their translations.The findings are as follows: First,in translating the names of Ci Pai of Li's Ci-poems,the Chinese translators maily employ ST,while the foreign translator Rexroth contends CT.Second,in translating the body of Li's Ci-poems,Xu and Hu understand the accurate connotative meanings of the words which represent the classical cultural Chinese images,so they mainly use ST as well as CT,which preserves the traditional Chinese culture and transfers it to the TL readers to a large extent so that they can appreciate unique charm of Chinese culture.Also,they have difficulty understanding the source language-target culture.But Rexroth and Zhong Ling mostly adopt CT,which is TL readers-oriented in order that the difficulties caused by the translation can be reduced.Third,Xu's translation is more semantic in metrical form,which advocates “three beautifulizations”,“three apperceptions” and “three transformations”,so his translation better delivers to the TL readers the linguistic characteristics and poetic structure of Li's Ci-poems and those of Song Ci-poetry.At last the conclusion is drawn that there is no clear line splitting CT method and ST method,so the two methods cannot be employed separately.Instead they should be used alternatively.In practice,to choose CT or ST,the translators should determine the readers' taste in poetry and take into consideration the artistic expression of the SL texts and the significance of the cultural transmission.Meanwhile,CST theory provides a good means to the translation of Li Qingzhao's Ci-poems,Chinese Song Cipoems and ancient classic writings theoretically and practically,which is helpful for traditional Chinese culture to go abroad in the new era.