Study On Fuzziness In The Translation Of The Book Of Songs

The Book of Songs is the cultural embryo of the Chinese nation and the precious legacy of the world culture. English translation of The Book of Songs has gone through a history of about one hundred years, while the research into the English translation of The Book of Songs is still vulnerable so far. The existing researches concern about theories for the translation of The Book of Songs, the overview of The Book of Songs translation and comparative analysis from the perspective of translator’s subjectivity etc. The paper studies on the translated version of The Book of Songs by employing the interdisciplinary theory "fuzzy theory" to analyze the features and translation countermeasures in linguistic, artistic conception and the style."Fuzzy theory" was firstly proposed by Zadeh. In Zadeh’s paper on Fuzzy Set, he pointed out "a fuzzy set is a category which is consisted of all the members whose membership makes up the continuous set". He acclaims when we classify the things in the real natural world, it is hard to find the standard to precisely judge its quality; so he proposed applying fuzzy set to deal with the fuzzy phenomenon. Later "fuzzy theory" is applied into many disciplines including linguistics and translation to help people with the fuzzy linguistic research and the improvement of translation theory. The study chooses three translated versions from James Legge, Auther Waley and Xu Yuanzhong; and the poems selected from songs, odes and hymns are in people’s favor whose themes range from love, politics to farming. Sample investigation is applied into the three aspects translation and finally contributes to some translation regulations. With the help of fuzzy theory, this paper centers on different degrees of fuzziness in the translation of linguistic, artistic conception and style from respectively the analysis of verbs, nouns; images, rhetoric devices and form, rhythm. Through overall analysis, it can be drawn as follows:in linguistic translation, the fuzzy expressions in the source language can find the relative fuzzy equivalents in the translated versions; in artistic conception reproduction, its fuzziness is reproduced in an absolutely fuzzy way in the translated version; in style transfer, the structure and rhythm in the source text are clearly presented and with the same are clearly shown in the target text.