A Report On C-E Translation Of Chapter Eight Of An Introduction To Chinese Zati Poetry(An Excerpt)

Although Zati poetry is part of Chinese poetry,its unique literary and aesthetic values are not very well considered by the academia of poetry studies.This report on the translation of the book An Introduction to Ancient Chinese Zati Poetry is to facilitate a literary and aesthetic understanding of the Chinese Zati poetry.An Introduction to Ancient Chinese Zati Poetry is a literary critique work written in modern Chinese.But it contains a large number of Zati poems in classical Chinese and some annotations of Chinese classics.The source text of this translation project comes from Chapter 8 which gives a detailed introduction to the poetic background,development and four categories of Zati poems in the Tang and the Song dynasties.Under the guidance of Nord’s translation principle of Function plus Loyalty,this translation tries to achieve the target-text referential function in target language,and takes into consideration target readers so as to ensure readability.Specifically,at lexical level,the translator adopts transliteration with annotations,literal translation and liberal translation to deal with the unique poetic terms,pronouns and allusions exclusive to China so as to properly deliver them to target readers and achieve the loyalty to source-text writer.At syntactic level,the translator takes into consideration the differences between Chinese and English syntactic structure,and employs omission,conversion and restructuring to make the target text conform to the target language habits and enhance its readability in a move to achieve the loyalty to the target readers.At textual level,the translator tries to produce a coherent text by means of lexical collocation,grammatical collocation and the restructuring of theme and rheme.This study finds that when dealing with poetic terms and pronouns exclusive to Chinese,the translator must be faithful to the source text so as to be loyal to the source-text write,she must also take readability into consideration to avoid that too much new information brings barriers to target readers.Therefore,the translator should try to keep a balance in the concrete text.Meanwhile,translator must fully understand the features of two languages because only in this way,can differences between Chinese and English syntactic structures be better solved.