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cultural Chinese, Tang poems were translated into English again and again. In this thesis, I choose three versions to compare and prove that translation is not only a science, but also an art.

The following are the source text and three English translation versions:

II.Contrasting of the Versions in the Perspective of Three-word Standard in Translation

2.1 Three-word Standard of Translation

In Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (《天演论》，published in 1898, translated by Yan Fu) , Yan fu said: “There are three difficulties in translation: Faithfulness, Expressiveness, and Elegance.” Nowadays, Faithfulness means that the content of target text must be faithful to the source text; Expressiveness means that the sentences must be fluent as the source styles and it must be the vernacular language and the people who speak target language can understand the translations completely; but Elegance’s meaning is different from its old meaning which means that the translation must be the ancient Chinese, and today it means that translation text can remain the style of the source text.

In other word, the three-word standard can be summarized as Faithfulness and Fluentness, and only when a translation gets the standards, it can be a good translation. In order to get a good translation, first the translators must master the source language and target language, and second the translator must know the content and spirit of the source text very well.

2.2 Faithfulness in Translation

In the first version, if we retranslate the text, we can find the most content was expressed in the translation. But in the title of the source text (《静夜思》),the important character is “think/thought (思)”，and in the content, “think/thought”(思)is the key word. But in the first version, the word “find” is not very suitable. In the source text, there is a character “望”. This word means “watch”, because the moon was in the sky at night, and we needn’t “find”. In version 2, most content was expressed in the translation also. But in the title, there is the same problem as version 1. And in line 2, the translator used an interrogative sentence to express the character “疑”，but in fact, in the source text, here “疑” have another meaning “doubt”. Because the poet didn’t sleep very well, but missed his hometown.

When he saw the moonlight on the ground, he felt lonely and cold, and then he wondered that maybe there was the frost on the ground. In the third version, the title is better than the others. In the text, the translator used “so bright, so cold, so frail ”, but in our source text, there is no character such as “如此明亮，如此冰冷，如此脆弱”. Of course, when we read the poem, we can feel that the poet was very lonely, seeing the moonlight, and missing his family. But the poem didn’t write the words, if the translator add to, the translation is not very good. In my opinion, from the perspective of faithfulness, the second one is better than the others.

2.3 Expressiveness in Translation

With the developing of Chinese language, some characters changed their old meanings nowadays, and some remain their meanings of thousands years ago. In the source text, the poet used very simple charac本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。