A Study On Image Translation In Ezra Pound’s Translation Of Shih-Ching From Contextual Adaptation

Shih-ching is one of the earliest collections of poems in the world and the most dazzling pearl of Chinese literature. The translation of such a masterpiece is a basic way for westerners to understand and appreciate the unique beauty of Chinese classic poetry, which provides the academic material for many scholars at home and abroad. Image is an intrinsic soul and prominent characteristic of Chinese classic poetry. And image in Shih-ching originate from the life of Chinese ancestors, bearing traditional moral values, conveying original cultural connotations, and expressing aesthetic sentiments and meaningful thoughts of the poets, which plays a special and important role in the cultural exchange between China and western countries. As one of the main founders of modern western literary, Ezra Pound is an American poet, critic, translator as well as a translation theorist. Pound, an initiator of imagism, advocated a movement in poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century and exerted a great influence in the world. Pound has also successfully translated a number of classical Chinese poems and benefited a lot from classical Chinese poetry. His English version of Shih-ching attracts much attention because of unique translation concept.Adaptation Theory is firstly proposed by Verschureren in his book Understanding Pragmatics in 2000. His view of pragmatics offers a new angle to investigate pragmatics. According to Adaptation Theory, language use is a continuous linguistic choice-making. The choice of language refers that adaptation dynamically to context and language structure is made based on the different degree of consciousness. Context is an important factor in communicative process, and language user should adapt to context to satisfy effective communicative needs. And translation is also the process of making choices based on adaptation to various contexts in order to meet the communicative needs. By combining factors such as readers, the translators, culture and so on, this thesis points out the process of image translation as the process of communication from the perspective of contextual adaptation. Furthermore, the translator should make different adaptations according to the mental world, social world and physical world in the reproduction process of image. The various adaptations provide different methods for image translation. This thesis takes Pond’s English version of Shih-ching as case study, making a deep research on how the translator adapts to essential elements in the mental world, social world and physical world in the process of image translation based on contextual adaptation. At last, the author makes a summary of Pound’s image translation strategies based on Li Yuliang’s classification of image translation in Shih-ching.This thesis introduces a pragmatic theory in viewing translation of Shih-ching and puts an emphasis on the aspect of images, in hope of that on the one hand, the contextual adaptation can enrich the translation researches of Shih-ching; on the other hand the thesis can provide new ways for image translation. And the research shows that except keeping the cultural connotation of original image, Pound creates new images to make the translated text faithful if possible. Moreover, he also plays an important role of subjectivity as a translator in bringing new concepts and ideas from Chinese poetry to his own country.