On Sublimational Translation Of Images In Classical Chinese Poetry

In the context of “Chinese culture’s going out”,the translation of classical Chinese poetry,which is the treasure of Chinese literature,plays an irreplaceable role in the dissemination of magnificent traditional Chinese culture.How to ideally reproduce the rhythm,style,and feelings of the original poem in the translation is the biggest challenge faced by translators all the time.For many years,Qian Zhongshu’s“sublimation” has been acknowledged as the criterion in the field of literary translation,as well as the highest ideal and highest standard of poetry translation.While Xu Yuanchong,a leading figure in translation,inherited the legacy of Qian’s translation thoughts,but made greater strides in theoretical research and further progress in literary translation practice.Aiming at the practical difficulties encountered in the process of poetry translation,Xu put forward a complete set of literary translation theory system,including the famous translation methodology—the Theory of “Three Transformations”(equalization,shallowing and deepening)based on abundant literary translation practice and lots of comparative study on different cultures,poems and translation theories between China and some other nations.Image is the soul of poetry.The success in the translation of classical Chinese poetry largely depends on the quality of image translation.The thesis aims to dig out the difficulties in image translation of classical Chinese poetry and discuss how the Theory of Three Transformations guide image translation and what specific translation strategies are used by the translators to reproduce the artistic conception of the poetry.This paper takes the English translations of 300 Tang Poems as the research object and chooses some typical poetry images,then makes an analysis of the sublimational translation of poetry images by different translators under the guidance of the Theory of Three Transformations(equalization,shallowing and deepening).As the research results show,differences between Chinese and English languages,cultures and thinking modes pose great challenges in image translation.However,according to different types of images,the context,the situation and the emotion of poets,translators can appropriately choose the method of equalization,shallowing or deepening to narrow the gap between the translated text and the original one,and reproduce the lost “poetic flavor” in the pursuit of “beauty in sense”,presenting the unique classical artistic effect and charm of Chinese poetry from “similarity in form”to “similarity in sense” until “similarity in spirit”.