A Translating Strategy For Subject Ellipsis In Ancient Chinese Poetry

Derived from paratactic cohesion, subject omission, including the omission of subjective noun and subjective personal pronoun (both nominative and genitive), ranks as one of the most popular syntactic features of ancient Chinese poetry. Subject omission, on the one hand, results from the concise, paratactic and highly flexible features of classical Chinese language; on the other hand, it directly ensures the poetic flavor of Chinese poetry, including the beauty of vagueness, implicitness, instinct, imagery, ideorealm, etc. However, most translators, both at home and abroad, considering the English expressing norms, followed a domesticating approach, supplemented the omitted subjects and added some logical linking components. As a result, not only the poetic flavor was dramatically tampered, but also the supreme standard of poetry translation, the "similarity in spirit", i.e., the similarity in style, flavor and ideorealm, was thus deviated. Poetry appreciation entails the aesthetic activity participated by readers' thought and feelings. When translated, the untransplantable poetic message in Chinese poetic form and syntax should be taken into consideration, a highly departure from which would make an unfaithful and spiritless version. Born of Mattern and Newmark's ST vs. TT models, this paper established a new one of "subject omission", designating the overlapped part of the "input variance" and the "output variance", also the common part in both "semantic translation and "communicative translation". Thus, this new strategy not only gets popular with foreign readers, but also conveys and transferred the original flavor. It effectively absorbs the valid ingredients of the "disembodiment" approach, and is proposed as a partly foreignization strategy, which are both initiated in this paper. Starting from the definition and function of subject omission, this paper illustrates its correlations with the characteristics of classical Chinese, features of poetic syntax and translation standard, followed by its close intimacy with the many traits of poetic aesthetics. By means of comparative analysis, induction and exemplification, diversified untranslatable cases of subjects are presented and the strategy of direct and indirect omission are suggested, followed by the conformation of the practicability of the direct one. The author of the dissertation maintains that the subject omission strategy is innately a most superior way of combining semantic translation and communicative translation, faithful to both the original and the readers.