Translation Strategies In Rendering Classical Chinese Poems

Relevance theory is verbal-communication theory. It provides translation with a unified theoretical framework: translation is an act of ostensive-inferential verbal interpretation; the translator should take the hearers context and response into consideration so that he can convey the exact information that original writer wants to convey to achieve the principle of optimal relevance. This paper offers a brief introduction of this framework and holds it is powerful in accounting for translation even the more sophisticated poetry translation phenomenon.Classical poetry is the treasure of Chinese literature, there are many translators, Chinese or abroad, devoted themselves to classical Chinese poetry translation. The translation methods are mainly divided into three ways: "Rhymed translation", "free verse translation" or "creative translation", during which the first two ways are under hot discussion of Chinese experts at present. But the actual consumers' expectations and cognitive environments are ignored. This paper adopts case study method in descriptive study by interviewing westerners to get their responses to different versions of one poem. The research purposes are as follows:Is poetry translatable or not? Does the poetry need to be translated?Which is the preferred method of poetry translation to the westerners?Should the implicated concepts be explicated?The research result shows that: 1. Poetry is translatable from the perspective of communication and many westerners are appealing to good translation to assist them in understanding the Chinese culture. 2. They are inclined to free verse translation. 3. The implicated concepts should be explicated to help them know more about the classical Chinese culture.All the results can be explained by the optimal relevance under the relevance theory, at the same time this empirical study proves the rationality and accountability of relevance theory.