A Study On Poetry Translation--From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As the highest form of the art of language, poetry conveys the nature of beauty by its unique form of condensation. Therefore, to enable people of other languages to have a successful grasp of the meaning of poems, poetry translation plays one of the most significant roles in the cross-cultural communication of this type.Taking a sweeping view over the researches on poetry translation, studies can be categorized as the following five aspects: (1) discussions on the relation between poetic form and poetic content, including literal translation; free translation; translating poetry into metrical poems; translating poetry into prose poems; theory of similarity in form; theory of similarity in spirit; advocating beauty in sound, in form and in meaning and insisting upon pluralistic standards of poetry translation. However, these arguments are not unitary. (2) discussions focused on the possibility of poetry translation.; (3) critical researches on poetry translation. Scholars in this type appraise some translator's specific works of translation and give their own views on the translated text (4) researches on the history of poetry translation; (5) researches on the interrelationship between poetry translation and culture, as well as the interrelationship between poetry translation and other disciplines, including studies on poetry translation from Cross-Cultural Communication, Relative Theory, Cognitive Linguistics and Reception Theory. However, none of them has adopted pragmatic-adaptive theory to analyze the complex process of making adaptations in poetry translation, particularly no description on sound adaptation has been mentioned.The researcher carries out a careful observation and analysis on the basis of Verschueren's adaptation theory, explores various adaptations made at both linguistic and contextual level in poetry translation, seeks the underlying reasons for different adaptations on linguistic and contextual choice-making in the process of poetry translation, especially the choices made at the sound level, while explaining how these adaptations influence the quality of the translated texts so as to enrich the theory of poetry translation and Verschueren's adaptation theory. The adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren is a perspective on language. Verschueren claims that the process of language use is a process of making language choices at every possible level of language structures and strategies, and that the reason for making a certain language choice lies in adapting to a certain context to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs and meanwhile, a certain language choice of one party of the interlocutor can also produce a certain context order to influence the other party of the interlocutor. In this thesis poetry translation will be pursued as a dynamic process and the basic elements of poetry will be illustrated. Differences at the sound, form and meaning level will be pointed out to reveal the necessity of making adaptations in poetry translation. And then, Verschueren's pragmatic adaptation theory is applied to explain how different adaptations with respect to poet's and reader's mental world, social world, physical world and linguistic reality affect the quality of the translation. It is found that making adaptations to the poet's intention and emotional involvement and reader's cognitive ability, to the social-cultural elements, to the temporal and spatial reference and to the linguistic reality including rhythm, rhyme and formal transplant are helpful in producing a more faithful translation and making the translated poem more acceptable.