On Indeterminacy Of Classical Chinese Poetry

In the1960s, Quine, Willard Van Orman, an American philosopher, put forward the view on the indeterminacy of translation in his monograph Word and Object. He believed that the language is indeterminate when it is used, and the indeterminacy also exists when one language is translated into another. Based on these indeterminacies, Quine, who thought that there is no only right translated version in the world, provided a new perspective and approach to study translation for us. This view has aroused great interest in the field of philosophy and translation. Jacques Derrida, one of the leading figures of the deconstruction, created the word "differance", and thought that the meaning of a text is indeterminate, which refers to that there is no ultimate unchanging meaning.Based on Quine’s indeterminacy of translation and deconstructionism, the dissertation analyzes the factors causing the indeterminacy of translation, discusses the indeterminacy of translation in detail from the aspects of words, sound, syntactic construction, image and semantic meaning of six English versions of the classical Chinese poem-Jiang Xue. It demonstrates the existence of indeterminacy in the process of translating classical Chinese poetry.The author divides this dissertation into six parts. Chapter one introduces the research background, research questions, research methods and the significance of the research. Chapter two is the literature review, which summarizes the previous studies at home and abroad on the indeterminacy of translation, the classical Chinese poetry translation as well as translations of Jiang Xue. Chapter three discusses philosophical origin of the indeterminacy of translation, Quine’s view on the indeterminacy of translation and Derrida’ deconstructionism. Chapter four analyzes the main factors causing the indeterminacy of translation. Chapter five takes six versions of the poem Jiang Xue as the case to carry on a comparative study from the aspects of words, sound, syntactic construction, image and semantic meaning to demonstrate the existence of indeterminacy of translation. Chapter six sums up the main viewpoint of the dissertation. Besides, it points out the limitations of this study, and comes up with some suggestions for further study.