A Comparative Study Of Multi-Translation Versions Of A Psalm Of Life And Its Aesthetic Representation

With the continuous development of translation theory and practice, the Chinese translation of foreign poetry attracts more and more attention to language researchers. In particular, the comparative study of different versions of the same foreign works has become a focus around the current translation field.This thesis selects the famous American poet, Longfellow’s poem A Psalm of Life with comparability of the Four Chinese Versions. The thesis takes Eugene Nida’s Dynamic Equivalence Theory (Formal Equivalence, Functional Equivalence) and China’s " Three Beauties "," Five Images " as the theoretical basis of the research, and focuses on the effects of Four Chinese Versions.Translation is no longer seen as a simple language translation process. A number of important factors should be taken into consideration, such as the historical background and aesthetic level, professional knowledge, or a different aesthetic orientation, as well as the background of a poet translator, the background of scholar translator, or simply a researcher as a translator. Unlike previous papers, this thesis compared from the perspective of above five factors, explored the reasons of different effects in four versions, analyzed the connotation of the various factors and tries to sum up the potential rules. This thesis will point out that, because of translators’ different times sense, different perspective of aesthetic appreciation, different entry points for translation, as well as different selections of the respective theories, which make the translation effect varies in the reproduction of original. Different aesthetic views of translators reproduce the original by different aesthetic judgments and retrieval skills. The poet translator and scholar’s translator, the researcher has their own choices of mining deep aesthetic value of the original, the pursuit of the form or not is distinguished. In this way, we can get many different translations, which is undutiful good to enrich our field of poetry translation.