On Translating Ancient Chinese Poetry Into English With Functional Equivalence

Ancient Chinese poetry is a brilliant pearl of Chinese culture,however,Tang poems can be praised as classic works for its concise language,elegant rhyme and typical artistic conception.It is translators'responsibility to transmit and carry forward Chinese classic culture.Some Americans and English people began to translate Tang poems in the early 20~thh while domestic researches on Tang poems translation began in the 1970s.There are various translations of Tang poems with big differences and distinctive characters up to now.We could get the privilege of comparative value from those translations.At the same time,the research areas on those translations were hotly debated by some scholars as well.Through analysis of related document literature,the author found a sufficient in this area,therefore,the research direction-On translating ancient Chinese poetry into English with functional equivalence was made.My thesis firstly introduces works and viewpoints of foreign and domestic scholars about translating ancient Chinese poetry into English,and then Nida's functional equivalence theory is introduced through the literature review.Nida thought that the standard to judge the translation didn't lie in the equivalence of vocabulary,grammar,and figures of speech,but in the correct understanding and appreciation of the poetry.The main purpose of translating ancient Chinese poetry into English is to popularize national culture.It is known that culture transmission cannot go without information spread,what's more,there is a great difference between Chinese and English.Therefore the characteristics of ancient Chinese poetry cannot be transplanted completely as a whole.Given to this,Nida's theory requires translators to reproduce poetry's original spiritual outlook,hoping to make target readers'response as same as source-text readers.Thus,translators must focus on the response of the two language receptors,and their response should probably be the same.For those people who are monolingual and lack of original text background,translation is the basic criterion for them to appreciate ancient Chinese poetry.This thesis,guided by Nida's functional equivalence,makes a detail analysis and comparison between ancient Chinese poetry and English poetry with qualitative,analytic study as well as literature research method and case study,in four aspects:rhyme,emotion,line arrangement,word order,image and proper nouns,and draws the conclusion that ancient Chinese poetry is translatable.Besides it makes a case study of 300 Tang poems translated by Xu Yuanchong and furthers the research on feasible translation strategies.What's more,every translated version conformed to English poetry norms could be found with its English example in English poetry.After this research the author suggests that ancient Chinese poetry translated into English could reproduce the source text's spiritual outlook.And according to different characteristics of ancient Chinese poetry,translators could adopt different translation strategies depending on different situations.For instance,the translation strategies to reproduce the rhyme are skillful to use alliteration,addition,repetition,and internal rhyme.The translation strategies to reproduce the form are skillful to use inversion,run-on line,semantic broadening and grammatical collocation.The translation strategies to reproduce emotion are skillful to use vocative expression,word ending and paregmenon.As for the translation of proper nouns,free translation,transliteration,and simplification could be applied in different conditions.