Liu Miqing's Translation Aesthetics

Translation Aesthetics was systemically introduced to China by Liu Miqing. By his Translation Aesthetics, he says that translation of a text between Chinese and English could be judged by some items, such as culture, translation style and aesthetic psychology. This theory offers a great standard to discusses the distinguish of different versions of a same text. In his book, Liu Miqing has mentioned that the aesthetics of translation should be founded on many aspects. To understand aesthetics translation, people should firstly know something about aesthetics itself. First of all, language is the subject of aesthetics of translation. As a activity which changes a kind of language message into an other language message, language changing is the

One way to solve this problem is to find a new rhythm in local language. Secondly, it is necessary to know the object and subject in the activity of translation aesthetics. The subject of translation aesthetic are translator and reader. At the first step, translator is required to have a special capability of aesthetic. It is translator’s knowledge, experience and level of language finally decides the quality of translation of a text. Thus, translator has to be sensitive and professional. On the other hand, the object of translation aesthetics is the original text and translated text. The origin text should have value to be translated and include the aspects of informative, inspirational, enlightening and descriptive. After knowing the object and subject of translation aesthetic, the other important aspect people should know is that the aesthetic of translation has to suit the local culture. Different nation or race has different culture conditions. A same symbol may represent different meaning in two background. It means that a great translation version should pay attention to the culture background and the beauty of

His Walden is one of his important works. In Walden, by recording his life in the woods, he proved his idea that people could live their life happily if they live in nature and be satisfied and enjoy their life.Thoreau doesn’t against the modern life. What he critics is people have not used it in a correct way. In his book, he points out that people’s life are becoming more and more implicated and complicated, and this trend will finally lead to a wane of human beings. At same time, he also comes up with the solution which is simplify. People should be brave enough to throw away the fragments of material that they don’t actually need for their basically living. Thoreau considers that a man could acquire inner peace if he lives in a simple way. And only in this way, the life of peace and simplify, people could have time to thinking.

Till now, many different Chinese version of Walden have been published. Some of them are greatly translated, but others are not good. For common readers, it is difficult and even impossible to read all of them, so it is hard to make a fair judgement. To compare different translation versions of a same text, a tool or standard is needed. According to Lui Miqing, translation aesthetics could offer a perfect way to make this