A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of The “Introductory Texts” Of The English Translation Of Chinese Classical Poetry

Classical Chinese poetry is the quintessence of Chinese traditional culture.Against the background of Chinese culture going out,Chinese poetry translation has played an important role in spreading Chinese culture.At present,the rich paratexts in the translation have begun to attract the attention of domestic scholars.Therefore,this translation practice project selects the ‘preface’ of Arthur Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems and Burton Watson’s Cold Mountain: Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shan.The ‘preface’ deals with the translator’s comments on Chinese literature,poets and works,the translator’s translation aims,translation choices and translation strategies,etc.It is of great reference value and significance for the translation of Chinese poetry.This report is on the E-C translation of introductory texts of the English version of Chinese classical poetry,including the translation preface and introduction.Guided by the theory of linguistic adaptability,which is put forward by the linguist Jef Verschueren,the translator first analyzes the communicative context and linguistic context of the source text from the perspective of contextual correlates of adaptability and adopts free translation,back translation and variation to adapt to the context of the target text.Secondly,the report discusses the structural objects of adaptability from the aspects of style and utterance-building ingredients and analyzes the applicable translation methods to meet the reading habits of the target language readers by using specific examples and combining them with the characteristics of the source language style.Finally,from the perspective of lexical and syntactic levels,the author illustrates that the process of choosing and using the target language is the process of dynamic adaptation of contextual relations and language structure.Dynamics of adaptability needs to be carried out throughout the translation process,with translators achieving pragmatic equivalence through translation techniques such as negation,extension and division.The study finds that the theory of linguistic adaptability has a certain guiding effect on introductory translations of literature,and the translation texts are more in line with Chinese writing habits and readability.In contrast to most translation practice reports involving the theory of linguistic adaptability,this report has adopted the form of translation comparison to analyse dynamic adaptation,so that the dynamic development process of translators’ cognition is more clearly explained;and the practical part of this report aims to study the status of Chinese poetry in the West from the translator’s perspective,to attempt to provide the experience of cultural translation and promote the external communication of Chinese culture.Meanwhile,it is an attempt to supplement and draw on the field of paratextual translation in the English translation of classical Chinese poetry.