Image Thinking—the Key to Literary Translation

Literature is a kind of art. Literary translation is to reproduce the art by artistic strategies. And image thinking as an indispensable feature and strategy of literary creation, is of great significance. Making full use of image thinking in the appreciation (speech-image-sense process) and expression (sense-image-speech process) of the original will guarantee better transformation of the artistic images and its beauty of the original in the translation. In this article, I attempt to prove that the image thinking is crucial to the success of literary translation by using two examples: the translation of a novelistic text and the translation of a poetic text.