Abstract：Aesthetics is a subject that explores how people feel about beauty. Translation aesthetics combines translation with aesthetics. Translation aesthetics discusses the relation between aesthetic subject and object in the perspective of aesthetics and explores the aesthetics’ significance to translation. For a long time, the development of aesthetics has stimulated the development of literature, so aesthetics is quite suitable for literary translation.

The thesis adopts Liu Miqing’s translation aesthetic theory and makes a contrastive study between the two Chinese versions of Jude the Obscure from the following two perspectives: the formal system including the phonetic level, the lexical level and the syntactic level, and the non-formal system including emotion, ideal, image and symbol. The purpose of this thesis aims to propose a different idea about translation study, make the translated version combine with the beauty of word and state, and return the features of word and emotion to the original version. Through the contrastive study, translators can better understand the basic theory of translation aesthetics and improve their abilities of translation and appreciation of the works translated. The conclusion of the study shows that the two versions have their own characteristics and language style, but Geng and Xiao’s version is better because of its fluent Chinese and beautiful language. 

Key Words: translation; aesthetics; version; contrastive study

CONTENTS

摘要

Abstract

1. Introduction-2

1.1 Study background-2

1.2 Significance of the study-2

1.3 Layout of the thesis-3

2. Theoretical basis-4

2.1 Brief introduction of translation aesthetics-4

2.2 Aesthetic object-5

2.2.1 Attributes of translation aesthetic object-6

2.2.2 The aesthetic makeup of translation aesthetic object-7

2.3 Aesthetic subject-8

2.4 The aesthetic process of literary translation-9

3. Case study: aesthetic representation of Jude the Obscure-11

3.1 The case: Jude the Obscure-11

3.1.1 Introduction to Jude the Obscure-11

3.2.1The phonetic level-13

3.2.2 The lexical level-15

3.2.3 The syntactic and textual level-16

3.3 The aesthetic representation in the non-formal system-17

3.3.1 Emotion and ideal-17

3.3.2 Image and symbol-18

4. Conclusion-20

Notes-21

References-22

Acknowledgements-23