A Tentative Approach To Poetry Translation Criticism

Translation criticism, a link between translation theory and practice, is an essential part of translation studies. However, among all the researches on translation criticism, poetry translation criticism receives much less attention and its development lags far behind. The thesis circumscribes its discussion on the classical Chinese poetry translation criticism and mainly focuses on comparison and analysis of different versions of translation for poems in Shi Jing, with the purpose to offer a more objective evaluation and explore potential in the appreciation of the poems in Shi Jing.For in the past poetry translation criticism was traditionally limited to a mere comparison of the linguistic equivalence between the original and the translation and confined to the analysis of the reproduction of the form of the source poem, which is not so objective. By elaborating on different approaches toward translation criticism of different translation schools, namely subjective and intuitive approaches, response-based approaches, text and discourse based approaches, the author intends to draw upon their constructive ideas for the formulation of a more rational poetry translation criticism model based on the unique characteristics of poetry translation.With the detailed analysis of the differences between the Chinese and English languages and the unique artistic and poetic features of Shi Jing, we can classify the translators into three categories of different period represented by James Legge, Herbert Giles, Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley respectively.Based on the text and discourse-oriented approaches and comparison of the translations for the three pieces of poems of different form, style and theme, the thesis has revealed the distinguishing characteristics of different translators, which can lead to the conclusion that it is the translators' purpose that affect his translation strategy and it is the historical and knowledge background that influence the translator's style. Therefore, when appreciating the translations the reader should be clear about his reading purpose and the unique artistic features of the source poem so that he will obtain the right version for himself and experience the beauty in the translation to full extent.