Abstract

Poetic line drawing is a great challenge in translation since its simplicity and realism not only use the simplest words to concisely depict the fact but also enable readers to understand in numerous ways. Taking Tianjingsha·Qiusi as an example, this paper discusses the translation strategies of line drawing in poetry from the perspective of transitivity. By the comparison of three translations, it is found that line drawing can trigger multiple processes in the mental cognition of readers, and in most cases, different translators tend to maintain a certain process type and abandon others, which might lead to some loss of the poem’s original charm and the translation turns out to be inaccurate. However, our study shows that such loss can be remedied through form equivalence strategy, for neither of the process types can be representative of all but only form equivalence can generate the same effect of the original poem.

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