A Study On Unintentional Mistranslations And Deliberate Mistranslations In Li Ch’ing-chao:Complete Poems

Implementing the national strategy of “the Spread of Chinese Culture Overseas” drastically promotes the spread of Chinese literature works.When introducing Chinese literature works to the world,however,many Chinese translators only consider whether cultural information attached to the source text can be completely embodied in the target text,and fail to focus on whether cultural information loaded can be understood or accepted by target readers.Therefore,it is of great necessity to make research on Chinese literary works translated by western translators,because they not only are competent in culture and language,but also evaluate and amend English translations based on target readers’ standpoints,so as to introduce Chinese culture to the global.In 1980,Kenneth Rexroth and Chung Ling co-translated and published Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems,the first English translation of Li Ch’ing-chao’s poems in U.S.,which aroused wide attention and received praise and abuse from scholars at home and aboard.Many scholars thought highly of this outstanding work while some scholars criticized it for mistranslations.For the writer,not all the mistranslations in Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems are unintentional translation mistakes.According to Xie Tianzhen’s classification of mistranslations,mistranslations can be classified into unintentional mistranslations and deliberate mistranslations.This thesis aims to analyze causes for unintentional mistranslations based on Xie Tianzhen’s mistranslation theory and causes for deliberate mistranslations by virtue of George Steiner’s fourfold hermeneutic motion theory,so as to prove that unintentional mistranslations are wrong while deliberate translations are rational and reasonable.After much research,it is found that unintentional mistranslations are caused by Kenneth Rexroth and Chung Ling’s incompetence in language and culture.Their incompetence in language refers to the misunderstanding of Chinese polysemous words and the same expression in Chinese and English,and their incompetence in culture is embodied in the loss of cultural images,loss of allusions and in-equivalence of cultural images.Deliberate mistranslations are caused by Kenneth Rexroth and Chung Ling’s subjectivity,which can be manifested in their “trust”,“aggression”,“incorporation” and “compensation” in the process of the translation.