Optimization From Different Angles

As a discipline, Translation Studies attracts more and more attentions from scholars and translators. As one of its branches, literature translation has attracted much more attentions, because of its feature and importance. Among all the literature genres, poetry translation bears the most divergent opinions. In the history of translation, translators, both at home and abroad, have put forward various strategies and criteria on poetry translation. They all define poetry respectively from different angles which they considered as the most important to a poem and then advocate their opinions on poetry translation. Their theories are reasonable and applicable regarding to certain aspects, but there is still no universally accepted one.As for translating Chinese classical poetry into English, the great differences of the two languages make it a harder task. So opinions of translators and theoreticians vary greatly from one to another. This thesis first confirms the translatability of Chinese classic poetry. By analyzing and comparing the characteristics of Chinese and English as well as their poetry, and inspired by some theories and thoughts of several translators, the author of this thesis claims that there are neither perfect translations nor absolutely advanced translating strategies. The translator of a specific work would certainly be influenced or limited by factors such as time, place, the characteristics of the source text, the expectant readers and so on. For instance, translators are at first readers, so they would subconsciously set their target text as the one that fit for their expectant readers. And then they would stress on different properties of the source text. So their translation must be an optimization from the angles regarded as the most important by them.Therefore, the author of this thesis boldly puts forward the concept of optimization. That is the translation task should achieve a kind of optimization from certain angles, so as to satisfy certain readers. Finally, the author of this thesis applied the concept of optimization to the translation of Tao Yuanming's poems. By analyzing several English versions of Tao's poems, we can sense the optimization taken by the translators from different angles. So the theory of optimization is applicable.