The Rhetoric Translation In Wang Rongpei's English Version Of The Peony Pavilion From The Perspective Of The Translator's Subjectivity

The Peony Pavilion is a romantic classical drama.Through the unremitting efforts of translators at home and abroad,The Peony Pavilion has been loved by foreign readers and has attracted worldwide attention.The famous translator Wang Rongpei's English version of The Peony Pavilion enjoys a high reputation and has been included in the “Library of Chinese Classics”.There are a large number of cases of rhetorical use in The Peony Pavilion,which is a treasure house of rhetoric language.The author of this thesis carried out a study on the rhetoric translation in Wang Rongpei's English version of The Peony Pavilion from the perspective of the translator's subjectivity.The subjectivity of Wang Rongpei as a translator is mainly reflected in his passion for translation,his translation choice,devotion to translation,and personal competence and qualification:(1)Wang Rongpei loved Chinese traditional culture and classic literature,and he was concerned about their popularity around the world through translation.(2)Wang Rongpei's translation choice mainly refers to the choice of the source text and translation strategies.The Peony Pavilion is a representative of Chinese classical drama.The humanistic ideal embodied in the drama attracts Wang Rongpei to do translation,in which he adopted various translation strategies and methods to achieve the purpose of“spreading the essence of Chinese culture”and“attracting western readers”.(3)Wang Rongpei's devotion to translation is mainly reflected in a lot of preparatory research work and activities to thoroughly understand the original text.It is also reflected in his own translation criteria of“conveying the meaning in its full flavor”(“????”).(4)Wang Rongpei possessed literary and bilingual competence.He had refined aesthetic taste in the understanding of the original and great creativity in the representation of the original in his translation.Through the study,it is found that in rhetoric translation,the translator's subjectivity of Wang Rongpei is mainly reflected in the following three aspects:(1)For the rhetoric translation of “imaginative beauty”,Wang Rongpei adopted literal translation,free translation,creative translation,addition and omission to preserve the images in the original text and showed his aesthetic ability to reproduce the imaginative beauty of rhetoric to the full extent.(2)For the rhetoric translation of “musical beauty”,Wang Rongpei adopted the translation method of “a combination of literal translation and free translation” and paid attention to reproducing the structural beauty and musical beauty of Chinese rhetoric.The translator displayed his bilingual ability and tried to find a suitable conversion in translating rhyme,tone,and rhythm.Some literary images and details of the original text were generalized or abstracted so that the important cultural information was transferred selectively.(3)For the rhetoric translation of “implicative beauty”,Wang Rongpei adopted free translation as the principal method and literal translation as the supplementary method.When dealing with puns,misinterpretations and other word games and some lyrics,the translator jumped out of the original semantic framework to recreate the translation of the translator's style,and practiced the criteria of “conveying the meaning in its full flavor” proposed by himself.Through the study of Wang Rongpei's English version of The Peony Pavilion,the author hopes to provide a reference for the studies on how to better present the rhetorical beauty of classical dramas in the translation.At the same time,the author hopes this study sheds light on the research into the way and the form of exerting the translator's subjectivity.