| A Sentence, as a grammatical unit with complete and independent meaning, is also the basic unit of translation. But in the process of sentence translation, it needs three stages: understanding, expressing and correcting. However, researches usually have to analyze the translators’ expressions through the translation products. Undoubtedly it is the same in English translation of Chinese Classics. Therefore, in this thesis I choose the text of Liaozhaizhiyi written by Pu Songling in Qing Dynasty and its English translations. Although there are many English translations, only four of them-Sondergard’s, Huang’s, Mair’s and Lu’s translations are chosen. The reasons for choosing them are as follows:on one hand, the four translations contain the same translated stories, and especially Sondergard’s and Huang’s translations are so complete that they are representative; on the other hand, the publication time of Sondergard’s and Huang’s translations are within one year and so are the Mair’s and Lu’s translations. What’s more, the four translations represent two kinds of translators whose native languages are respectively English and Chinese. Therefore, the purpose of selecting four English translations is to have a comparison and present the distinctive translation strategies of translators as many as possible.This research used the knowledge of linguistics, translation studies and narratology, took sentences in Liaozhaizhiyi as the research object to explore the subject determination, syntactic shift, clause combining and semantic restructuring from the aspects of syntactic structure and semantic content. Through classification and induction of those strategies, it aimed at answering the following three questions:1. How do different translators use translation strategies in syntactic structure and semantic content? 2. Do the native Chinese translators have similarities with native English translators in syntactic structure and semantic content? 3.What are the reasons of those strategies and the implications for Chinese classics?The study finds whether the translators have a native language of English or Chinese, in subject determination, they adopted subject supplement strategy, subject substitution strategy and subject reduction strategy through different ways; in syntactic shift, they adopted affirmation-negation shift, declaration-interrogation shift, direct-indirect speech shift; in clause combination, they chose main clauses and adopted cohesive devices to achieve cohesion and coherence; in semantic restructuring, they chose to adjust information, implicit information and explicit information. At the same time, different translators adopted the above strategies in accordance with different sentence structure, different thinking mode and different narrative tradition in C-E language.The study has some enlightenment for the research and practice of English translation of Chinese Classics. In practice, translators could adopt the strategies. And both the translation practice and the research of Chinese Classics need a deep understanding about differences between Chinese and English languages. The last but not the least, English translation of Chinese Classics also needs multiple translations and translations of different forms. |
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