Abstract
For some Western translators before the twentieth century, domestication was their strategy to translate the classical Chinese poetry into English. But the consequence of this strategy was the sacrifice of the ideogrammic nature of these poems. The translators in the twentieth century, especially the Imagist poets and translators in the 1930s, overcame the problems of their predecessors and their translation theory and practice was close to that of the contemporary semiotic translators. But both Imagist translators and contemporary semiotic translators have the problem of indifference to the feeling of the original in their translations.
For the problem of translating the classical Chinese poetry by the Westerners before the twentieth century and the Imagist poets and translators of the twentieth century, see Zhao and Flotow 2018.
This paper attempts to set up an aesthetic-semiotic approach to the translation of the iconicity of classical Chinese poetry on the basis of the examination of both Eastern and Western translation studies.
