On The Translation Of Cultural Images In Five English Versions Of Mao Zedong's Poetry

Throughout over the two-thousand-year brilliant history of Chinese poetry, Mao Zedong, as a great thinker, strategist, leader of China, is as well a great poet. Mao Zedong's poetry, because of its highly artistic, idealistic and cultural value, has occupied a glorious position and gained a great reputation in the history of Chinese poetry, and thus has made great influence worldwide. So far Mao Zedong's poetry has been translated at home and abroad into many languages and versions, with the number of English versions arriving to nearly twenty. The study of Mao Zedong's poetry has already made great achievement, but the study of English translation of Mao's poetry is evidently inadequate, especially the comparative study of English versions. So many English versions perfectly provide rich materials for the comparative study. Moreover, images are believed to be the soul of poetry creation and appreciation. Mao's poetry is filled with various and vivid images and most of them are permeated with rich and deep Chinese culture. These cultural images constitute a distinct characteristic of Mao's poetry. So this thesis focuses upon the translation of cultural images in five selected English versions of Mao's poetry, and aims to compare and discuss how the five versions deal with cultural images, and tries to exploit something like rules or laws of translating cultural images, and thus gains something enlightening for the translation of cultural image and poetry translation.This thesis first gives an overall introduction to the five selected English versions. Then, based upon the interpretations of the image in China and the West, it studies the connotation of the cultural image. Next, according to the classification of culture given by Eugene A. Nida and the situation where cultural images occur in Mao's poetry, it discusses in detail the feature, classification and function of cultural images in Mao's poetry. Afterwards it sorts out, makes lists of and observes most typical cultural images in the five versions; then with the multiple methods of text analysis, statistics and contrastive linguistics, it carries out the descriptive and comparative discussion on how the five versions deal with each category of cultural images. So it is found that there is no obvious consistency in translating those images by category, i.e. there is no tendency for all the versions to use certain translation method to deal with certain kind of cultural images; there is also no tendency for a version to use certain method for most of the images; even the use of the same method produces different translations due to different diction or sentence structures. Not only do the foreign and Chinese translators very often deal with a single cultural image in different ways, but sometimes the translators from the same nation do it quite differently. This great diversity which seems to have little rule is just the forceful manifestation of translator's subjectivity. Based upon the detailed comparison and discussion on how the five versions deal with each category of cultural images, it is found that the diversity is mainly manifested in two aspects:one is the national difference; the other is the individual difference. Concretely speaking, the national difference is illustrated in three cases. Firstly, as for ecological images, Chinese translators tend to integrate the human's quality and emotion into the reproduction of the images while foreign translators focus more upon the objective manifestation of the images themselves. That can be attributed to the different philosophical thinking between Chinese and westerners. Also, Chinese have a better grasp of the deep meaning of the images while foreigners have no thorough understanding of the poetic style or tone. Secondly, foreign translators tend to use foreignization in order to retain the foreignness and introduce Chinese culture while Chinese counterparts prefer domestication for the sake of readers' acceptance and poetic beauty. Thirdly, many social images are ignored by foreign translators while much regarded by Chinese translators. The individual difference is mainly attributed to the difference in translator's interpretation of cultural image and translation view. At last, a quite rational and comprehensive knowledge of translating cultural image and poetry can be gained through the analyses upon the translation of cultural images in five versions. Moreover, the translator's initiative and creativity deserve much attention and encouragement.