【正确答案】 1、正确答案：The original is a typical classic Chinese poem of eight lines, each containing strictly five characters. It is endowed with the end rhyme of "iao" all through the lines. Xu Yuanchong"s version, though distorts some meanings, reproduces the poetic effect of the original. With six or so words in each line, Xu"s version more or less maintains the rhythm of the Chinese poem. More importantly, it is also a verse with the rhyme of "ts" , "ds" and "t". As for the cultural elements, just like "yin" and "yang" , they are simply free-translated into "light" and "shade". That rendering avoids referring to the notion alien to the TT reader, and enables them to read the poem at the similar ease with the ST reader, yet the exotic flavor is totally lost. Hinton"s version faithfully preserves the message, yet the translated version loses all the rhymes, thus it reads more like a prose rather than a verse. Not only does Hinton"s version lose all the rhyme schemes, but it also ignores the tonal pattern. The lines are reconstructed into completely different ones, and punctuations no longer appear in the end of a line as they used to in the original. According to Katharina Reiss, one of the most important principles for the translator is the complete fidelity to the intent of the original author. She also proposes that all texts can be divided into four categories, namely, content-focused, form-focused, appeal-focused, and audio-focused texts. An ideal translation should resemble the ST in conceptual, formal, and communicative functions, but the three functions are not equal. Thus one of the translator"s key tasks before he sets down his pen is to make out the focus of the original. Enlightened by that principle, poetry, as a highly form-focused text, is judged in relation to their aesthetics, as well as their stylistic , semantic and grammatical characteristics. In this sense, rendering a poetical text from a SL as prose text in a TL is not translating in the strict sense, because as for poet translation, the fidelity to the content is secondary to the fidelity to the form and aesthetic value. The original boasts the merit of typical Chinese classical poetry in that it has a perfect matching between lines, as well as the repetition of end rhyme. That is the defining feature of the ST and it is worth extra efforts. Xu"s version is better in that it successfully achieves the preservation and reproduction of the original poem.