Earticle

초록

영어

The translation of Chinese Tang Poems is of great importance for introducing the traditional Chinese culture. The “imagery (Yixiang)”, as one of the distinctive features of the Tang Poems, has long been a challenging issue for the translators. This study aims to evaluate the imagery translation within the larger frame of translation and culture. The concept of imagery was originally a philosophical and aesthetical concept. According to the definition from Cihai, the most comprehensive dictionary in China, “Imagery (Yixiang)” belongs to the category of ancient Chinese aesthetics. Yi refers to the feeling or mind of the individuals while Xiang represents the objects existing in the actual world. By combining the two together, “Imagery (Yixiang)” symbolizes an individual’s personal feelings in a particular situation through his or her interaction with certain objects. The single imagery may convey certain feelings of a poet, but most often, the imageries correlate with each other and work together to form an imaginative picture in the mind of the readers, be it gloomy or magnificent etc. It can be said that imagery is cultural-bound. The translators, as readers of the original poems, have to first recreate the exact imagery in the source poems. Any distortion of the imagery through translation would inevitably affect the understanding of the poems by the target readers. The paper applies the Hermeneutics Translation Theory to research the translation of imagery in classical Chinese poems. It compares three translation versions of several Chinese poems by translators from different cultural backgrounds. According to the Hermeneutics Translation Theory put forward by George Steiner, the process of translation is interpretation, which can be described with four steps, namely, trust, aggression, incorporation, and restitution. During the translating process, the translators inevitably bring their personal experiences, their cultural backgrounds, and cognition into the interpretation. In this way, the translated text is reproduced and recreated differently. Through the comparison and analysis of three English versions of the several Chinese poems, it can be found that the imagery translation by the Chinese translators has more advantages over that done by translators from other cultural backgrounds. This is especially demonstrated in the last two steps of “incorporation” and “restitution.”

키워드

저자

• Min GAO [ State University of New York at Binghamton Chinese ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  한국외국어대학교 통번역연구소 학술대회

• 간기

  반년간

• 수록기간

  2016~2026

• 십진분류

  KDC 717 DDC 400