Open-ended Thick Translation and Synthesized Thin Translation: An Inquiry into the Poetic Translation of Chuang Tzu

This article focuses on different translation methods dealing with the characteristics of Chuang Tzu’s open-ended poetics in the English renditions of Chuang Tzu, and investigates into the translators’ translation discourse in the paratexts of the target texts for further confirmation of their poetic translation strategies, so as to explore the poetics notions of these translators of the classics. The study finds that the poetic translation strategies for the open-ended poetics of Chuang Tzu can be roughly classified into two categories: the open-ended thick translation and the synthesized thin translation. The open-ended thick translation is chiefly characterized by translators’ use of thick translation by rendering the paratexts of the original, namely the different annotation-commentary texts produced by Chuang Tzu’s commentators, to avoid a narrowing of the possible sense of the original text and leave some space open for readers to explore further on their own; the synthesized thin translation is, however, featured by translators’ use of thin translation by rendering the meaning of the original that the translators think is the most appropriate after careful textual research, on the basis of distinguishing between multiple commentaries available for studying Chuang Tzu or referring to diverse views of their peers. Finally, we propose some implications of translation poetics theory for translating Chuang Tzu.