Explicitness And Simplification Of Hu Shih’s Poetry Translation

Hu Shih can be regarded as a prominent scholar in various fields. Due to somepolitical restraints, some research concerning him was hampered. But hiscontributions to literature as well as philosophy cannot be ignored since his worksplay a significant role in the course of Chinese history. In spite of being a scholarand a philosopher, he is also a translator. He has translated approximately thirtypoems and seventeen fictions. His masterwork Anthology of Trials（《尝试集》）andPost-anthology of Trials （《尝试后集》）have incorporated couple of his translationwork of poetry. Besides, he translated short stories which also sparked the literaturemovement in China.As a pioneer of Chinese free verse and vernacular Chinese translation, he hasprovided us with thought-provoking ideas on translation. His translationmasterpieces as well as his thoughts on translation can be regarded as a milestone inChina’s translation history, since he lives in a period when both political and literaryrevolution took place. A synchronic study of translators in this period contributes tothe overall studies of translation.This thesis elaborates on Hu Shih’s translation work from both macro andmicro perspective: a holistic study summarizes the historical background and literaryproposals, followed by adopting a small-size corpus study to generalize the universalfeatures of Hu Shih’s poetry translation. A small-size corpus is constructed to verifyMona Baker’s universal features of translation and straighten out Hu Shih’s ownunique strategies through analysis, which altogether with the previous chapter makesan organic descriptive study of Hu Shih’s poetry translation in a top-down manner.Through a comparative analysis of the original poems and Hu Shih’s translationversion, it reveals that explicitness and simplification manifest in Hu Shin’s poetrytranslation. After this analysis, this thesis also makes a tentative study of motivations behind both explicitness and simplification from the perspective of thecharacteristics of poems itself, different linguistic norms between Chinese andEnglish, cultural differences as well as the idiosyncrasies of the translator.Thanks to abundant resources of his works, this thesis provides a newperspective to analyze other translators under the framework of a corpus-baseddescriptive model to demonstrate what Mona Baker called universal features oftranslation which manifest in Hu Shih’s poetry translation. In addition, this thesisadds up new categories of features to the existing translation universals. Moreover,it analyzes the motivations behind explicitness and simplification. Finally, this thesismakes a list of situations in which explicitness and simplification can be applied. Infuture research, a corpus collection can be made to summarize features of varioustranslations in different periods, which will provide more evidence to verify therecurrent features of translation or to add more categories of translation features.