A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Out Of Africa From The Translation Aesthetics Perspective

Karen Blixen(1885-1962),the most prestigious Danish female writer,she has been well-known for her English autobiographical novel Out of Africa.In the novel,the author described a poetic African world with human and nature integrating in harmony;complex relationships between African tribes and colonial whites;the sweets and bitters of life in Africa.Although the work is of remarkable aesthetic value and cultural significance,it has gotten less attention in China.Most Chinese people learned this work of literature from the Hollywood movie Out of Africa.Even fewer people have read the original work.The Chinese translations are on the increase in recent years,but excellent translations are hard to find.A few studies on the novel home and abroad have been made from female consciousness,colonialism,ecologism,narratology,etc.However,it has never been studied from the perspective of translation aesthetics.Translation aesthetics is a marriage of translation and aesthetics.The process of translation is the course of aesthetic reproduction.Therefore,translation and aesthetics cannot be separated.Applying translation aesthetics theories to translation practice could stimulate the translators' perception and enhance their artistic aesthetic reproduction level in literary translation to represent the aesthetics values and features and display the greatest artistic charm.That is the significance of translation aesthetics.With translation aesthetic theory of Liu Miqing as guiding principle,the thesis chooses Zhou Guoyong and Zhang He(2013)and Ye Qingcheng(2015)two Chinese versions of Out of Africa as examples,attempts to make comparisons in scene description,animal description,character description,psychological description.It tries to analyze how the aesthetic subject and the aesthetic object come to harmony in the aesthetic representation process and how they interact to convey the core content of aesthetic value of the novel and achieve the expected literary effects.Through the comparing of the carefully selected examples in the two Chinese versions,the author finds that,on the whole,both versions preserve and represent the aesthetic features of the original work.Zhou Guoyong and Zhang He(hereinafter referred to as Zhou&Zhang)better handle in syntax and rhetoric in scene description and psychological description.Ye Qingcheng(hereinafter referred to as Ye)is superior in animal description,character description,and reproduces more vivid images of animals and characters,which leaves a deep impression on the readers.The study on Out of Africa in the thesis is a significant practice which aims to offer a reference and enlightenments to translators for further understanding of translation aesthetics.It is also intended to provide a new perspective for the evaluation on translation works to prove that translation aesthetics can be instructive to translation practices.Besides,the author of the thesis bears a purpose to arouse the interests of readers in Out of Africa,to push forward the research and improvement of the Chinese version of Out of Africa and to reveal the artistic value of the extraordinary work as much as possible to the world.