Research on the Rhetorical Semantic Fuzziness of Chinese and its Korean Translation : The “Three Hundred Tang Poems” as an Example

Abstract

Fuzziness and precision are both the essential attributes of natural language. The accuracy of language(especially literary language) expression is relative, while fuzziness is absolute. The semantic fuzziness of literary works is embodied in linguistic, cultural and rhetorical levels. This paper mainly studies the semantic fuzziness of Chinese Rhetoric. The semantic fuzziness at the rhetorical level is also reflected in the translation process and the target text. In translating rhetorical fuzziness, the translator need not only pay attention to the fuzziness and the differences in rhetoric between the two languages, but also correctly understand the aesthetic quality of the original work, so as to reproduce various aesthetic images of the original work in the target language.<BR> In view of this, this paper, based on the theory of fuzziness, constructs a Chinese Korean bilingual parallel corpus of “Three Hundred Tang Poems”, with the original texts and two versions of Korean translation. By corpus research methods, this paper investigates and analyzes the semantic fuzziness of rhetoric in the “Three Hundred Tang Poems” and its two translation versions. It also examines translation activities and explores the translation strategies of rhetorical fuzzy semantics from the angle of natural language fuzziness. In the process of translation, the translator chooses certain translation strategies on the basis of a process from deep understanding of rhetoric meaning and cultural background of the original text, to keeping the form and content of the original texts, and to a comprehensive processing of information in the original and target texts ultimately. The process of translation is a process in which the translator constantly integrates various intralingual and illocutionary factors, to choose language and translation strategies according to context, language structures and social psychology.