Approaches And The Purpose

Aesthetics studies beauty and sense of beauty, which is usually evaluated by thesound, shape, form, color, symmetry and etc., whose sensibility is the ability to perceiveaesthetically. In China, Confucius thought the standard for evaluating beauty must be inaccordance with the ideas of “true” and “kind”. Aesthetics has been in close relationshipwith Chinese translation theory, which includes the four stages: source-text orientation,faithfulness, resemblance of spirit, and ideorealm.In the work, An Introduction to Translation Aesthetics, Professor Liu Miqingproposed the ideas of translation aesthetics that aesthetic subjects are those who carry outaesthetic activities and the aesthetic objects can be divided into the formal system and thenon-formal system. The idea makes it a possibility that the Chinese translation aestheticsmakes a major step forward by applying the traditional Chinese aesthetic thoughts to theactual practice of translation activities.Adopting the aesthetic thoughts proposed by Professor Liu as the theoreticalguidance, this thesis is a case study of two English versions of First Visit to the Red Clifffrom aesthetic perspective by analyzing the aesthetic constituents in the works. Theauthor of the thesis tries to reveal that translation process from Chinese to English is alost process, depending on the translators’ choice what to obtain, and what to lose. Theauthor reaches a conclusion that it provides a new perspective for First Visit to the RedCliff to enrich the comparison of English versions in China.