On Transmission Of Traditional Chinese Emotions

Profound national culture could be found nearly everywhere in Chinese classics, and always lies in the connotation of emotions. Therefore, the translation of emotional culture is one of the keys to the translation of Chinese classics, the importance and significance of which has been highly valued nowadays. With the emotional culture system as its main body and traditional Chinese short stories together with their English versions as its data, this research, free from the constraints of words, sentences and texts, begins with the penetration into the language of natural emotions, carries out the comprehensive and in-depth study on the emotional categories and their traditional cultures, and makes detailed investigation into the corresponding transmission process and effects. Meanwhile, this study compares and contrasts the Chinese and western transmissions of emotions together with their cognitive and national cultural motives, and puts forward a series of Chinese emotional translation strategies with emotional portrayal as the goal in translation practice. Accordingly, this dissertation consists of eight chapters, including introduction and conclusion.The first chapter, Introduction, begins with the review of the achievements as well as shortcomings in the emotional research from the linguistic and psychological perspectives and the comment on the corresponding studies on culture, cultural and emotional translations, illustrates the background and significance of this research, elaborates the theoretical foundations of philosophy and research methods, and ends with the frame and main idea of this dissertation.The second chapter, with the classification of emotions as its beginning, categorizes the emotion into natural and ethical or moral levels, and further constructs the multi-level emotional category which is composed of ontological, expressive and cultural sub-categories. Besides, this study, with the metaphtonymy from the cognitive linguistics, points out that national culture influences and constrains the selection and use of metaphtonymic models as well as the emotional language. Thus, this essay starts from the concrete expressions of emotions and the analysis of metaphtonymy for the exploration of the national philosophy and cultural elements. The correct original differentiation between Chinese and western transmissions of emotions will ensure the correct translation and introduction of traditional Chinese culture to the western world.Chapter Three traces back to the Chinese classical music aesthetic root of "Xi" and "Le" and the love essence of "Xi" from the ontological level of the category of happiness, analyses the conditions, semantic types and corresponding social elements of "Laugh" from the expressive level, and investigates the nationality and cultural connotation of "Laugh", "Xia", "Shi" and "Yi" from the cultural level. And the integration of "Li" and "Le" displays the Chinese classical philosophy of "resting content with one's life" and "enjoying happiness with the people". Furthermore, the analysis of translation of "Xiao" and its corresponding words of respect and humility provides a breakthrough for this research.Chapter Four works from the ontological category of the emotions of anger, to the expressive categories of faces, gestures, abusive words, colors and organs of human bodies for the analysis of transmissions with Oriental emotional colors, and then up to the cultural categories like "Qi", "cultivation for harmony", "causality of good and evil", and "harmony between Heaven and human" for the further exploration of Chinese classic philosophy and national spirits.The fifth part starts with the illustration of the happiness-oriented culture and oriental tragic spirit of sadness, analyses the transmission process and effects of the ontological categories of "sorrow" and the like, the expressive categories of "crying", "five tastes", "physical injury" and "natural images", and further explores the fatalism, "Bian" and "Hua", "Xiao" and "Li" through the translation analysis of the cultural categories of "Heaven and fate", "concern for the world and the life" and "funeral ceremony.Chapter Six analyses the translation of fear. It highlights the happiness or aesthetics of fear in translation through the analysis of the transmission and effects of ontological categories of "Jing" and "Wei", the expressive categories of faces, gestures, and situations. Moreover, this part investigates the cultural categories of life and death outlooks with Yi and Xiao as the basic motives, and beliefs in ghosts of ethical or moral significance.The seventh part first stresses the nature and nationality of emotional cultural translation, holds that emotional portrayal consists of natural and moral emotional portrayal with the latter as the core, puts forward the corresponding translation strategies, and finally emphasizes the translator's subjectivity and the reasonable allocation of aesthetic distance in emotional translation.As the summary, Chapter Eight weighs the gains and losses of this research, and foresees the follow-up studies.