A Relevance-Adaptation Approach To Chinese Versions Of Shakespeare's Images In His Procreation Sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets,as known to all that know English literature or the bard,are outstanding representatives,say,salt or flower,of English Renaissance poetry.Image is a necessary means of artistic expression in poetry,including Shakespeare's sonnets.Academics believe that among Shakespeare's 154 sonnets,the first 17 are procreation sonnets,in which the poet uses a large number of natural and non-natural images to express the importance of marriage and childbearing and the ruthless depiction of time to his friend.Therefore,through grasping the expression and translation of the poet's images,the target readers may be helped to understand the poet's minds and better grasp the gist of the procreation sonnets.Previous studies on images in Shakespeare's sonnets have mostly focused on translation comparison and whether the translation strategies adopted to reproduce the original images,largely ignoring image translation in the procreation sonnets,let alone an in-depth analysis of the translation strategies on the part of different sonnet translators.Relevance-Adaptation model is a research model that combines Relevance Theory with Adaptation Theory under the rubric of pragmatics or pragma-translatology.In this theoretical framework,translation is both an ostensive-inferential process to find relevance and a dynamic adaptation process,that is,the translator searches for relevance in the cognitive context of the original text and makes dynamic adaptation in the cognitive context of the target text.Based on the corpus of five Chinese versions of Zongdai Liang,Tu'An,Minglun Cao,Zhengkun Gu,and Guojin Hou,this thesis attempts to study the image translation of Shakespeare's 17 procreation sonnets from the Relevance-Adaptation model.This thesis aims to analyze the reproduction of rhetoric and rhythm of image translation in five versions,to discuss the cultural loss or reservation during the process of English-Chinese translation and the reasons,as well as the effects under different translation strategies.It is found that:different translators have respective merits and styles in translating images in Shakespeare's procreation sonnets that worth learning for image translation in poetry:1)In terms of lexical level,when translating images,Cao flexibly translates part of speech and adds modal markers such as yo to convey the marriage-dissuading mood to the target reader;Gu and Hou use many Chinese four-character phrases to make the target text well adapt to the Chinese readers'aesthetic expectation;Gu's style of translating images is of Chinese antique flavor,which resembles the aesthetic taste of classical Chinese poetry;Hou translates abstract nouns by using verbs that is flexible and thus rendering the translated language more vivid and readable,and humorous image translation style has made the marriage-dissuading tone livelier in the target text;2)In terms of rhetorical level,Cao utilizes phonological and semantic features of the Chinese characters to recreate rhetorical images in his translation;Liang adds rhetoric devices such as using creative adjectives or verbs to personified images,which renders images well convey the contextual effect of the poet;Tu uses modern spoken Chinese to translate images or rhetorical devices,and adds footnotes to express his interpretations on images to help the target readers better grasp the gist of every sonnet;3)In terms of phonological level,Liang,Tu and Cao have translated the fixed rhyme of Shakespeare's sonnets(a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g)faithfully into their translations by using“12 characters and five beats”rule(?????)and“taking pause instead of the foot”(????)to adapt to the aesthetic expectation and acceptability of the target reader;Hou also takes inner phonological rhymes into account when translating images to reproduce original contextual effect.Compared with other image translation of the literary translation,this thesis also provides some suggestions from the perspective of pragmatranslatology: during the process of translating poetic images,the translator must flexibly choose different translation strategies to reproduce as much image effect in the translation as possible.1)If the image has the same cognitive effect in the source language and the target language context,it can be reproduced by direct translation;2)If the image also plays a rhetorical effect such as metaphor,pun,oxymoron or rhythmical effect in the original sonnet,the translator should,as far as possible,select words and rhymes in the target language to reproduce its artistic effect on the premise of obtaining the best relevance;3)If the rhetoric,rhythm or cultural meaning of the original poetic image is confusing to reproduce in the target language,the translator should consider converting the image or adding footnotes,and keep the poet's communicative intention as much as possible.Moreover,the converted image should not conflict with the cultural atmosphere of the original sonnet.