Classics Translation Study Via Intertextual Analysis And Computation

This dissertation undertakes a profound study on the intertextual relationship in Chinese tea classics and the corresponding translation strategies, with intertextuality and memetic as its academic theories and similarity computation and corpus as its technique supports. Data are obtained from the rendering of two representative tea works, The Classic of Tea written in the Tang Dynasty, and Sequel to The Classic of Tea in Qing. The aim is to reveal the complicated interplay of intertextual relations among and between different texts in languages and cultures, and their influence on the translation method and process. It is an interdisciplinary research, with enlightening references to relevant areas of bi-lingual corpus construction, machine-aided translation and cultural communication. It is hoped that the research can contribute to presenting Chinese tea culture to the world, and the enlightening result may be generalized to the study of Chinese classics translation as a whole.Intertextuality was developed in the period from structuralism to post-structuralism, pioneered by the French critic Kristeva on the basis of Bakhtin's theories of Dialogism and Polyphonic Principle. According to this theory, only after the cross-reference to its pre-texts, can the meaning of a text be rationally generated and comprehended. The connotation of the text comes from its intertexts, and the construction of a new intertext is a dynamic process, both dependent on the intertextx. This idea throws light on translation studies. Being an intertexual process itself in cross-cultural and interlingual communication, translation tallies well with intertextuality, thus guiding translation theoretically and practically.Memetic is originated from Dawin's theory of Evolution, which is adopted in this study to explore the prevailing and complicated imitation phenomena in Chinese classical texts, especially within the domain of tea culture.Similarity computation refers to the calculation and statistics of similarity degrees between or among different objects. Being an indispensible component in knowledge representation and Information retrieval, similarity computation has been widely used in many fields such as text classification and clustering as well as information retrieval. Nevertheless, this technique has not yet been applied to the analysis of the multilayers of intertextuality in classical texts and their translation. Since the similarity is an important sign to reveal the manifest intertextuality at different levels of the text, some algorithms such as dice coefficient, matching coefficient, full confidence, cosine, and Vector Space Model (VSM) are compared and proposed to provide a quantitative data-based translation index, which offers valuable help to the accuracy and consistency in both source text comprehension and target version translation.This research explores the characteristic intertextual features of tea classics, such as the overlapping theme, concentrated domain, associated content, recurring terms and intercross styles, all contributing to their highly similar and restricted linguistic identity r for-computer-aided translation. This may serve to verify the feasibility of the interdisciplinary research joining intertextual theory, modern IT technology and classical translation studies, which provides a big potential to computer technology in the research of liberal arts.The dissertation contains five chapters, with the lead-in part as an introduction of the research background, significance and the representativeness of the case study.Chapter One provides an analytical literature review of intertextuality, its development and close relationship with translation studies, as well as the related researches home and abroad. An exploration to the memetic inheritance is conducted to explain the complicated intertextual phenomena in Chinese.classics; Chapter Two focuses on the study of two tea classics,their prominent feature of intertextuality and memetic relationship, revealing the radical role of memes in the pretexts. In addition, the intertextual computation, with four different algorithms and improved calculation of VSM, is applied to measure the intertextuality and provide insightful references with statistics for a translation index. The next two chapters embark on an in-depth study on tea classics' translation from the perspective of intertextuality. An idea of Trifold-Fusion of Horizons in classics translation is put forward, and some corresponding translation strategies are proposed respectively with topic, stylistic, genre, resource, lexical, diachronic and hierarchical intertextuality.The fifth chapter carries out an interdisciplinary study to optimize classics translation with computer technology in three aspects:One demonstrates some new insights provided by the study of intertextuality into machine-aided translation; another carries out the experiments of multilayer anchor-points to improve the alignment accuracy in a bilingual parallel corpus of tea classics. The third parts, based upon the ergodic theory, deals with a transfer of translation medium from the traditional paper-based version to web-based electronic hypertext, providing a multi-dimensional and dynamically interactive way to facilitate translators' hierarchical notes in hypertextual links, so as to satisfy target readers' specific needs and better understanding. The last part draws a conclusion, pointing out the limitations of the present study and presenting aspects for further studies in the future.