English Translation Of Metonymies In Legends Of The Condor Heroes:A Case Study From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

With the advancement of economy,cultural development and spread is becoming increasingly popular.The issue of “making Chinese culture known to the world” is not just a slogan only but is gradually made manifest in numerous translations of Chinese literatures instead.Among various Chinese literatures,martial arts novels represented by Jin Yong’s works,which is characterized with rich Chinese culture,enjoy a special status.As one of Jin Yong’s representative works,Legends of the Condor Heroes is no stranger to countless Chinese.In 2018,the publication of A Hero Born: Legends of the Condor Heroes Vol.1 translated by Anna Holmwood marked the official spread of this novel into the western countries.Long before the emergence of Anna Holmwood’s translation,a translation version of this novel made by a group of martial arts fans led by Moinllieon had already been in circulation in the internet community of martial arts.Although it has not been officially published,it exerts great influence on the group of western martial arts fans and attracts a large number of readers.Thus,both translation versions deserve to be studied.As a special symbol of Chinese literature,martial arts fiction poses great difficulties to translators.Metonymic expression in the original text and target texts often elude the attention of scholars.Traditional views usually regard metonymy as a rhetoric device while recent development in cognitive linguistics provides a refreshed perspective for the metonymy researches.From this perspective,metonymy is conceived of not only as an embellishment in speech but also a cognitive process which can help us conceptualize one event by its relation with another.By exhaustive tagging of the source text and its two translation versions,which are made by Anna Holmwood and martial arts fans respectively,this thesis tries to make quantitative and qualitative analysis of cognitive features of typical metonymies in the original text and corresponding translations as part of an effort to explore cognitive preferences of different translators and try to explain the following questions: 1.What are the typical metonymies in the original text and its two translations? How are they distributed? 2.According to Construal Theory,what kinds of construal preference are presented in the two texts respectively?The research findings include: the original text and its two translation texts mainly consist of five metonymy types,which are subevent & complex event,single entity & collection,characteristic & entity,action & state,and participant & action,and the respective number of metonymies in the two translation texts is obviously higher than that in the original text.2.Within the dimensions of construal theory,Holmwood’s translation is more salient in the degree of specificity and takes on more shifts in profile.Meanwhile,Holmwood is more inclined to employ subjective construal in the dimension of perspective.Apart from exploring cognitive preferences displayed in the two translation versions,this study can also bring about some inspiration for the practical studies on the translation of martial arts fiction,making some contribution to the spread of Chinese culture to the outside world.