A Comparative Study On Two English Versions Of Li Sao From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

With the spread of Chinese culture overseas,studies on the English translation of Chinese classics have become increasingly prominent.Chu Ci is the first collection of romantic poetry in the history of Chinese literature.Li Sao,as one of the representative works in Chu Ci,is the cornerstone of romantic poetry.Over the past 100 years,Li Sao has been translated into various English versions.However,studies on its English translations are not abundant.The previous studies on the English translation of Li Sao mainly focus on the language features,translation strategies and translation styles of the translated texts.The studies about the translators’ cognitive translation process and the factors affecting the translators’ cognitive operations are still relatively rare.In view of the above research gap,taking the two English versions of Li Sao translated respectively by Xu Yuanchong and Stephen Owen as the research object,this thesis analyzes the similarities and differences between the two translators’ cognitive construal operations and reveals the factors that affect the two translators’ construal operations from the perspective of construal theory in cognitive grammar.This thesis also explores how these two translators adjust their construal operations to approximate the cognitive equivalence between the source text and the target texts.The research findings are as follows.Firstly,various dimensions of construal will interact with each other when the translators construe the source text and reconstruct the target text.From the perspective of focusing,the differences between the two translators’ construal operations are manifested in the translation of culture-loaded words and the selection of scopes.Based on the dimension of perspective,the differences are reflected in the syntactic,lexical and voice levels.From the perspective of prominence,the differences are presented in the division of the trajector and landmark,the arrangement of the word order as well as the usage of special sentence patterns.The differences from the view of specificity are mainly reflected in the vocabulary and sentence levels.Stephen Owen’s version is full of strong cultural awareness of the source language.His construal operations approximate those in the source text.Xu attaches great importance to the beauty of sound and form.The construal operations between his version and the source text are relatively different.His version conveys the profound meaning of the source text and presents the features of the Sao-style poetry.Secondly,the two translators belong to different speech communities,so they have different conceptual ways of conceiving the world and utilize different linguistic and grammatical encoding forms.Translators’ cognitive construal operations may be affected by some objective factors,such as cultural background,literary form,language style and thinking mode.They are also affected by subjective factors like translators’ subjectivity.Translators’ subjectivity mainly includes the translation purposes,translation thoughts and translators’ attitudes towards the source text.Thirdly,translators adjust their construal operations to approximate the cognitive equivalence between the source text and the target texts.In order to ensure the reading experience of target language readers,Stephen Owen restores construal operations of the source text to his version to a large extent,while Xu Yuanchong reconstructs the target text by conducting different construal operations from the source text.Both of the two translators exert some subjectivity by choosing different perspectives and prominent parts and utilizing different degrees of specificity to interpret the source text in different linguistic codes.Based on the cognitive construal theory,this study analyzes the similarities and differences between the two translators’ construal operations and reveals the factors that influence the two translators’ different translated versions of Li Sao.The research findings can,to a certain degree,enrich the studies on the English translations of Li Sao and enlighten the studies on poetry translation from the cognitive grammar theory.In addition,this study will provide some valuable strategies for translators.