A Cognitive Study On The Translation Of Metaphors In The Peony Pavilion

The Peony Pavilion is a romantic tragicomedy with 55 scenes which tells the love story between Du Lining and Liu Mengmei.It has been translated into more than20 languages.Cyril Birch’s and Wang Rongpei’s English versions belong to different cultural systems with its own style of translation,and both enjoy high prestige and authority.Metaphor,according to cognitive linguistics,is a way of thinking.The Peony Pavilion contains various metaphors that have served as valuable study materials for metaphorical analysis.On the other hand,few studies delve into the core cognitive motivation that leads to disparities in metaphor translation in concrete and operatable dimensions.Translation is a cognitive activity in which the translator recodes the source text,encompassing both source text deconstruction and target text construction.When the translator deconstructs the original text,he will insert his own knowledge and background as well as his own personality traits.The discrepancy in the translation is due to the translator ’s subjectivity,and divergences in translation can only be explained if the translator ’s diverse approaches of construal are taken into account.This thesis uses exemplary materials from Wang Rongpei’s and Cyril Birch’s English versions of The Peony Pavilion to conduct a comparative analysis and systematic research of the seven metaphorical themes(HUMAN IS PLANT,HUMAN IS ANIMAL,EMOTION IS SCENERY,LOVE IS SPRING,RELIGIOUS IS REALITY,LEGEND IS REALITY and UP AND DOWN)in The Peony Pavilion.By doing so,the author discovers that the discrepancies are mostly found at the lexical and syntactic levels.Using the differences in The Peony Pavilion’s metaphor translations as a sticking point,this thesis discusses the great explanatory power of construal operation to translation differences between Chinese and Western translators,using the theory of construal as its theoretical foundation and construa l dimensions(i.e.,scope and background,specificity,perspective,and prominence)as its theoretical perspectives.The thesis asserts that translators approach the task of interpreting the original text from a variety of perspectives,and their selections of words and sentences will have distinct features,resulting in English translations of varying styles.As a result,the findings of this paper illustrate that cognitive perspective provides a solid cognitive basis as well as a fresh perspective for discovering and explaining translators’ subjectivity.At the same time,it expands the theoretical space for research on text translation discrepancies in English.