English Translation of Taiwan’s Concrete Poetry: A Preliminary Study

• Main Authors: Ci-shu Shen, 沈碁恕
• Other Authors: Yi-ping Wu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/24322636393449565151

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 口筆譯研究所 === 99 === This thesis aims at an experimental translation of Taiwan’s concrete poetry by applying the translation procedure based on Relevance Theory proposed by Ernst-August Gutt. In this study, Taiwan’s concrete poetry is divided into three categories: visual poetry, sound poetry, and kinetic poetry. Next, this classification functions as the poem selection criteria, by which four concrete poems by Taiwan poets Zhan Bing, Chen Li, and Lin Yao-de are selected. Lastly, translation practice on the four concrete poems are conducted to explore the translatability of respective category and useful translation strategies. According to Chinese scholar Wang Ke, Taiwan has the most developed works and studies of concrete poetry. Nonetheless, Taiwan’s concrete poems have seldom been translated into English and their visibility in the Western world is limited. Therefore, it is urgent to introduce Taiwan’s concrete poems to Western readers through English translation. The translation practice follows Gutt’s translation procedure and is divided into two major stages. In the first stage, we discover the author’s informative intention of each poem, indentify the explicatures and implicatures in the original, and derive interpretations from the implicatures. In the second stage, we specify the target audience, determine the translator’s intended interpretation, reproduce implicatures in the translation to guide our readers, and finally assess interpretive resemblance between the original and the translation. Due to the easy loss of concrete poetry’s visual, auditory and kinetic effects in translation, we resort to Western concrete poets’ techniques. Based on those creative techniques, we induct two translation strategies—linguistic deviations and typographical deviations. The former means that a translator may transform English letters into visual symbols and alter the writing order of traditional English poetry; the later denotes that translator may utilize fonts, capital letters, lowercase letters and punctuation marks to constitute special effects of concrete poetry. With the translation strategies, we produce English translation of Taiwan’s concrete poems which are previously regarded as untranslatable. The findings also suggest that visual poetry may be the least translatable, ensued by sound poetry and kinetic poetry. The translation practice has proved that Taiwan’s concrete poetry may be translatable if unorthodox translation strategies are adopted. Moreover, even if the implicatures found in the original are replicated in the translation, such a translation still may not interpretively resemble the original due to the change of context. Thereby, it may be necessary to strengthen certain implicatures in the translation or add new ones to lead the target audience toward the translator’s intended interpretation. In sum, this thesis is a preliminary study of English translation of Taiwan’s concrete poems. It is hoped that this study may attract more academic attention to the translation of Taiwan’s concrete poetry. Despite the limited number of examples, the research may still be instructive to researchers and translators interested in introducing Taiwan’s concrete poetry to the foreign readers through translation.