Meaning And Form Are Meaningful

Recent days have witnessed the heated debates about how to deal with meaning and form in literary translation. Is it really valid for the prevailing information—oriented or semantic—based translation? Does form in literary works require being faithful? The writer's heroic and dauntless spirit to create an astonishing but wonderful effects produced by form in his literary creation reflects his poetic strategies. From the perspective of literary authors, form is not something trivial or incidental, but part of literary content itself. However under the influence of U. Nida's theory of functional equivalence, most literary translators have adopted informational strategies, with the meaning of the original work obtained but the form somewhat ignored. Hence, the literariness(文学性) of the original work fails to be conveyed faithfully and the versions are overshadowed by the glamour of their respective original work.In Chapter Ⅰ, the author expounds the relationship between form and meaning from varied angles, which is supposed to be consistent and not opposite to each other. Just as Professor Xu Yuanchong put forward that in engaging in literary translation it requires conveying not only truth but also beauty; seeking truth is the prerequisite and seeking beauty absolutely necessary. Therefore, bearing in mind that meaning and form are meaningful is a way out in doing literary translation.In Chapter Ⅱ, the author expounds the reasons why the form of literary works shouldn't be looked down upon. Literature becomes what it is due to the fact that it's bestowed with the aesthetic or poetic function. And form constitutes the basis of the literariness contained in the original literary works. Thus conveying the meaning without ignoring the formal features can meet the demand of making the literariness evident. Furthermore, it's also the requirement of achieving facsimile of culture.The author chiefly discusses semantic transformation and formal transformation in Chapter Ⅲ. The key issue to actualize the semantic transformation lies in how to obtain correct comprehension of the translation text. Contextual analysis, grammatical analysisand logic analysis are three effective approaches to achieving penetrating comprehension. After that, the author touches upon the formal transformation based on the lexical level of writing system, the sentence structural level and the paragraph level. And then the author takes into consideration how to combine above-mentioned transformations harmoniously.At the end of the paper, the writer discussed the formal translation strategies. And four measures are covered in restoring the effects or charm of form. Also, the author articulated that the translation skills mentioned above are not isolated, but always applied comprehensively.The end of the paper serves as a conclusion which summarizes the original purpose of making the tentative research.