Aesthetic values in literary translation: Zhang’s versus Dong’s version of David Copperfield in Chinese

The analyses and discussions herein, regarding the Chinese translations of Charles Dickens’sDavid Copperfieldby Zhang Guruo and Dong Qiusi, offer insights into the process of translating that produces aesthetic equivalence. Through an investigation of how Zhang succeeds in representing the source text’s aesthetic values in his target text, I argue that aesthetic values in literary texts need not be restricted either to linguistics or to aesthetics. Therefore, I will focus on the general implications of translation, so that the insights thus gained can be applied to the broader field of literary translation.This paper first examines the general process of representing aesthetic values, which involves three stages: aesthetic comprehension, aesthetic transformation and aesthetic improvement. Second, Zhang’s translation methods and his theoretical thinking concerning translation is compared with Dong’s translation process in an attempt to show that aesthetic equivalence is an important factor in effectively governing literary translation. Third, based on Zhang’s Chinese translation ofDavid Copperfield, in-depth discussions via Zhang’s contrastive techniques intend to show that the process of transforming linguistic meaning and aesthetic images into the target text results in image actualisation. Fourth,simpaticoor’ empathy’ between linguistic meaning and aesthetic experience across languages will be discussed.