thousand years without failure, the relevant research is too numerous to mention. The Book of Songs is a research object in the study of classics translation. Its relevant research mainly focuses on the macroscopic history level or the translation text of a translator. The microcosmic level of English poetry is slightly less than that of some kind of subject poems.

1.1 Motives and Purpose of the Thesis

The significance and beauty of The Book of Songs give the author the original motive to study such a classical collection.The Book of Songs is the source of Chinese literature. Since ancient times, there have been many scholars studying its rich cultural connotation. In recent years, in order to better spread the The Book of Songs culture, translators and the scholars have spared no effort on poetry translation work. At present, most of the studies on translation of The Book of Songs are from the perspective of literature and culture in phonological, phonetic, and syntactic aspects, considering that the translation of The Book of Songs should be vivid. However, these studies rarely involve systematic translation of cultural images in The Book of Songs, and few have systematically studied image translation in depth.

Take Legge’s three “The Book of Songs” translation versions as the example, one is the 1871 no rhyme translation; one is the 1876 rhyme translation; another is the 1879 election. On the whole, due to the influence of the translator’s religious philosophical point of view, the translation motive and historical environment, Legge’s various translations attach importance to the political and ethical significance of poetry, and the translation of the silkworm poetry in The Book of Songs has its corresponding change.

This thesis is mainly designed to do a comprehensive analysis on the English translation of cultural images of silkworm and mulberry in The Book of Songs. The author analyzes the translation of The Book of Songs and provides the cultural and ideological differences between the original language and the pure language gap, promoting The Book of Songs to the West.

1.2 Structure of the Thesis

The fundamental purpose of the author to study images in The Book of Songs, is to find out the language features, and also to discover a better way to translate the beauty of the literary gem.

In order to achieve this goal, the author adopts the methods of case study, comparative study, literature research, text analysis to make a comprehensive study of silkworm and mulberry images. The thesis is designed to analyze the achievements and shortcomings of several influential translations of The Book of Songs, especially the translation of silkworm and mulberry poems; and to try to explore the relevant problems, translation strategies and translation principles in the translation of The Book of Songs, aimed at the general principles of the translation practice of classical poetry culture and finding a new perspective for image translation. One of the most difficult part of the thesis is the large amount of literature reading; also, the English version of The Book of Songs, with a short history of more than 200 years, has achieved a great number of both selected and completed versions. It is difficult to analyze different versions translated by various translators. There are ten complete translation versions, and the author chooses three of them (X.Y. Z’s and Yang Hsien- yi’s) for analysis. What’s more, Ezra Pound’s version is used to distinguish several features.

II. Literature Review

This chapter will mainly narrate the previous studies on translated versions of The Book of Songs and the studies on translation of The Book of Songs. A summary is to conclude the limitation of the previous studies, and explain the differences between the present study and the other’s.