A Report On The E-c Translation Of Essentials Of Cognitive Grammar(Chapter 2)

This is a report of an English-Chinese translation practice.The source text is selected from Essentials of Cognitive Grammar,which was written by Ronald W.Langacker,the creator of Cognitive Grammar.The second chapter of Essentials of Cognitive Grammar is selected by the translator as the source text.The translated version contains 23,514 words.The chosen part mainly focuses on the elaboration of conceptual semantics.The report first presents the background,the objectives and the significance of the translation project.Next,it briefly introduces the author and the contents of the source text.In addition,from the lexical and syntactic aspects,the report elaborates on the difficulties encountered during this translation project.The focus of this report is applying Construal Theory to the translation process with the purpose of dealing with translation difficulties.From a cognitive perspective,Construal Theory effectively explains the language phenomenon that a variety of expressions can be used to describe the same situation.The reason behind is the differences in such cognitive factors as perspectives and prominent contents in viewing the same scene.And it has been widely applied to guide and interpret the translation process.To solve the difficulties in translating linguistic terminology and derived nouns,the translator adopts the translation methods of accumulation of terminology and shift of mental scanning.As to the difficulties in syntactic aspect,the translator uses methods of prominence corresponding,prominence adjustment,maintaining the original sequential scanning and cognitive increment to deal with the translation of passive voice,the arrangement of sense groups and the translation of omitted parts.Possessing a rigorous structure and concise language,the source text gives a thorough argumentation on relations between meaning and conceptualization.It is hoped that this translated version can help readers to further explore Cognitive Grammar and provide a reference for the translation of related texts.