| Translation is a linguistic and cultural activity of conveying information, i.e. the transformation of the meaning from a source-language text to a target-language text. However, translation is not only a process of the transformation between languages but a process of aesthetic especially in literary translation. In recent years, translation aesthetics draws more and more attention of the scholars. The notions of langue and parole come first from Saussure, of which the former is the language considered as an abstract system or a social institution, being the common possession of a speech community, while the latter is language of the individual. Accordingly, Qian Guanlian proposed the beauty of langue and the beauty of parole: the former is the aesthetic property of language system, the combination of aesthetic value and aesthetic feature presented by language system; the latter refers to the combination of aesthetic value and aesthetic feature of language fragment in the speech act of individual. The two concepts reveal the aesthetic property of language.Translation aesthetics, which studies translation from the aspect of aesthetics, is closely related to the theory and practice of translation. Translation aesthetics, which combines modern linguistics and aesthetics, studies the aesthetic features in inter-lingual transfer i.e. translation, explicate thoroughly the beauty of three aspects: beauty of original text, beauty of translated version, and the beauty of conversion operations from the original text to the translated version. Translation aesthetics as an aesthetic judgement of translation, provides a deep and vivid perspective for translation criticism especially for the analysis of literary translation. It reveals the aesthetic features that include formal beauty and non-formal beauty of the aesthetic object; it studies the translation strategy the aesthetic subject made according to the aesthetic object and the measures the aesthetic subject apply in order to achieve aesthetic effect during the process of representation of beauty.The thesis, based on the theory of translation aesthetics, does a comparative analysis of the reproduction of beauty in the Chinese versions of The Merchant of Venice that translated by Zhu Shenghao and Liang Shiqiu who are the two great translators and scholars of Shakespeare. The thesis aims to verify the combination of aesthetics and translation do contribute to drama translation by discussing the types of representation of beauty through the analysis of the text in the drama and trying to find out how the two translators realized aesthetics through translation. It is to appreciate the beauty of the Chinese version of The merchant of Venice and to analyze the aesthetic object of the source text and how the aesthetic subject present the beauty in the target text, thus to do intercultural and interdisciplinary research of drama translation.The thesis studies the reproduction of two Chinese versions of Shakespeare's famous work The Merchant of Venice from the perspective of translation aesthetics which is the appreciation of beauty under the guidance of aesthetics. It first analyzes the aesthetic object of both the source and the target texts and then analyzes the aesthetic subject of the translation. For the beauty in sound, the thesis mainly discusses the rhymes and the tones that reflected in the texts. For the beauty of lexis, the thesis analyzes the words. For syntax and discourse, the thesis focuses on the sentence type, the grammar, the cohesion. As to the beauty of stylistic, the thesis analyzes the style and the rhetorical devices of the texts of the texts and makes a conclusion. Beauty in artistic creation, the thesis extracted some specific examples from both the English and the Chinese version to analyze. According to the results of the research, the thesis offers some suggestions of translation strategy, looking forward to contributing to classic drama translation. |
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