A Research On The English-Chinese Translation Of F.Bacon's Essays From The Perspective Of Translation As Writing

As one of the important genres in literature history,essay writing has undergone a long history of evolution.Essays are characterized by their syntactic explicitness and connotative complexity.Essays writing as well as essay translation have attracted much attention in the field of translation studies at home and abroad.“The Essays or Counsel,Civil and Moral”(The Essays)by Francis Bacon was popularly regarded as the master piece of Francis Bacon and was translated into many languages including Chinese.In the present research,the author took diverse Chinese versions of “The Essays”,including the versions translated by Prof.Wang Zuoliang,Mr Shui Tiantong and Prof.Cao Minglun,as the subject of research.Taking the theory of translation as writing as the theoretical framework,the author took the endeavor to make a contrast between the version produced by Prof.Wang Zuoliang and the ones produced by others,in the hope of disclosing the peculiar ways of thinking and syntactic creating during essay translation,thus offering inspiring reference to essay translation.The present thesis intended to focus its attention on seeking possible solutions to the following questions: 1).the lexical and syntactic features of the Essays by Francis Bacon;2).the potential feasibility of applying the theory of translation as writing to essay translation;3)the peculiar ways of thinking and essay-producing while Prof.Wang Zuoliang translated F.Bacon's essays.The research indicated that,while the Essays by Francis Bacon are elegantly concise,explicitly persuasive,and in-heart provoking,the Chinese version by Prof.Wang almost perfectly interprets the original theme and represents the original style as well.The research also proved that translation intermingles with writing,and that,like writing,translators shall undergo the process of perception,apprehension,reconstruction and proofreading.The view of translation as writing helps interpret the original as adequately as possible while eliminating word-to-word translation.