On Reproducing Rhetorical Devices In The Chinese Translation Of Ethical Wisdom

This thesis is a translation report based on the translation of Ethical Wisdom.This book is informative and interesting. Moreover, it is highly appreciated andwidely praised for its content and style. As to its content, it includes five parts, witheach part centered on a moral organ. As to its style, the frequent use of the rhetoricaldevices enhances its readability and popularity. The translator has decided to translatethe third and the fifth parts, respectively centered on loyalty and purity/sacredness.One of the major features in the original text is the frequent use of rhetoricaldevices, such as simile, metaphor, personification, parallelism, repetition, allusion andantithesis, which can greatly enrich images, increase expressivity, and enhance thereadability. Thus, during the process of translating, it’s of great significance toreproduce these rhetorical devices. Then Yan Fu’s “Faithfulness” acts as thetranslation criterion and principle guiding the translator to retain the original style asmuch as possible. According to the different ways of image shift used in thetranslation of rhetorical devices, the translation methods mainly fall into the followingfour categories: retaining the image, adding the image or exposition, replacing theimage, and omitting the image. Moreover, all these translation methods are adopted toachieve the faithfulness to the original text to an utmost extent.In this report, the translator describes the task, records the translation process,analyzes the translation difficulties and summarizes the translation strategies. Due tothe importance of rhetorical devices, the translator gives a rhetorical analysis of theoriginal text, and then presents a case analysis of rhetorical translation. In the end, theconclusion, which serves to improve the translator in the future, is focused on theimportance of Yan Fu’s faithfulness, the combination of the translation practice andtheory, and the dynamic process of translating.