Analysis Of English Translation Of Chinese Classics From The Perspective Of Register Theory

Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling was written by Li Yu who lived in the period of late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty.This literary work covers almost every aspect of ancient people's daily life,and is a summary of Li Yu's life experience in the whole life.Therefore,this book is known as "the Art of Ancient Life".Register theory is an important theory of systemic functional linguistics.Chinese classics are concise and comprehensive,extensive and profound.Without the help of cultural context and situational context,namely register,it is difficult to deeply understand the profound philosophy and meaning behind the words.Under the guidance of register theory and with the help of Hall's high and low context,this thesis takes Li Yu's Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling and its English translation as the corpus,and makes a detailed and practical analysis and discussion on how to obtain equivalence between source text and translated text from the perspectives of field,tenor and mode.First from the perspective of field,the thesis mainly discusses how to correctly understand and accurately express the deep cultural implication hidden in the original classic text,in order to establish the cultural equivalence based on the field equivalence between the original text and the translated version,which proves to be the key to translation success.From the perspective of tenor and mode,according to the difference between the two languages that Chinese,especially Chinese classics,belongs to high cultural context while English low context culture,Chinese classics tends to build the textual meaning mainly by relying on the implicit meaning coherence in the text,with the employment of short sentences,often omitting subjects and logical relationship between clauses and paragraphs,rarely using explicit connection means to form a discourse.In the light of these,this translation study suggests that "supplemental explicit translation strategy" or "explicitation" can help to bridge the gap between source text and the translated text.This study shows that by adding explanatory language or by adding notes,to make the hidden contextualmeaning of the source text explicit in the translation,and by adding syntactic elements such as subjects and cohesive ties to make explicit the logical semantic relationship between sentences or paragraphs etc.,the functional equivalence between source language and target language can be achieved as far as possible.The supplemental explicit translation method based on literal translation strategy is an optimal choice for the English translation of Chinese classics.The purpose of this study is to provide some tangible help for the world to know and understand Li Yu and his Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling.We also hope that this study can make some contribution for the reasonable translation strategy choice and translation theory establishment of the ancient Chinese literature classics.