To Create Artistic Conception With Heart And Convey Spirit Through Form

Prose,as a literary form,is as important as poetry,novel and allegory.Dating back to ancient times,the numerous essays have played an important role in the history of Chinese literature.Prose is characterized by its beautiful language and profound artistic conception.Through translation,translators can not only represent the beauty of the original to the target readers,but promote cultural communication and exchange.Therefore,when doing the prose translation,translators have to represent the literary meaning,and meanwhile,all the goodness of the original,so that the translation can make the target readers experience the same or familiar aesthetic feelings that the original presents to the original readers.The biggest challenge the translators are facing in translation is how to represent both the form and the spirit of the essays.The author’s translation texts take five narrative essays from A Treasury of Shen Congwen Essays:An Affectionate Sailor and an Affectionate Woman,The Street,A Letter Never Delivered,The Fair,and A Grass and a Duckweed.Under the instruction of Translation Aesthetics theory of Liu Miqing and based on the author’s own translation of essays,the author introduces the translation activity,analyzes the translation methods with examples and summarizes the translation activity.This report consists of four chapters:in Chapter I,the author introduces the translation material and the significance of the translation practice;in Chapter Ⅱ,the task process is introduced,including the choice of translation theory,the analysis of the selected essays,the translation principles for the prose and the translation process;Chapter III is about case study-translation activity under Translation Aesthetics Theory.The author illustrates aesthetic representation from formal and non-formal systems by giving examples:in the formal system,the aesthetic representation of sound,word,sentence and paragraph is analyzed.The beauty of the original can be reproduced by imitating the original or making it up in some other ways;at the non-formal system,the aesthetic representation of images and artistic conception is analyzed.To represent the beauty,the aesthetic subject,the translator,should exert his/her initiatives,including his/her aesthetic feeling,knowledge,capability and tenacity while sticking to the content of the original;Chapter IV is the conclusion part.While acknowledging the representation of aesthetic elements,the author analyzes the loss of the beauty from two aspects—the limit of translatability of the aesthetic elements and the ability limit of the aesthetic subject,and at last,summarizes the translation activity.The purpose of this report is to analyze the problems having occurred in the process of translation,find some helpful principles for the translation of narrative essays.Besides,through this translation practice,the author hopes to improve her translation ability for prose and provide references for the practice of and research on the translation of narrative essays.