A Study On Mapping And Creative Imitation In Prose Translation From The Perspective Of Embodied Cognitive Linguistics

Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics is an important achievement of the development of Cognitive Linguistics.It is a new linguistic based on embodiment philosophy,Marxist materialist dialectics and postmodern philosophy,which insists on the materialist view and humanistic spirit of language research,and runs through the core principle of reality-cognition-language.In recent years,the translation and research of literary works with regional characteristics have gradually become an important text and way for readers around the world to know China,which helps foreign readers to have a comprehensive understanding of China from different aspects and angles,promoting cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries,and opening up perspectives for the extension of Chinese culture to the outside world.Jia Pingwa is one of the leading writers in Shaanxi Province,and the translation and research of his work named Selected Prose of Jia Pingwa is of representative significance in literary translation.In Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics,the sameness is mapping and the difference is creative imitation.Based on this,the thesis attempts to use case-study method to analyse the translators’mapping and creative imitation from the aspects of lexical selection,syntactic structure and grammatical meaning in the English version of Selected Prose of Jia Pingwa.The results of this study show that translators in different native language backgrounds use mapping or creative imitation in the conversion of vocabulary,syntactic structure and grammatical meaning between source language and target language,that is,the selection of similarities and differences is based on the real life experience of the two languages and is completed under the guidance of the principle of reality--cognition--language.In the process of translation of literary works with strong regional features from Chinese to English,the selection of dialect words as well as the conversion of grammatical structure and grammatical meaning between both languages are intended to convey the meaning of the source text accurately,which needs not only to imitate the source text and the expression style to a large extent,but also to combine with the characteristics of English for creative imitation,and which needs to achieve a balance between the conversion of the two languages through mapping and creative imitation by taking into account both the source text and the target reader.Mapping and creative imitation are the important process of translation based on the principle of embodied-cognition and the result of the cognitive operations of the source text.Under the guidance of Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics,translation of literary works focuses on the mapping and creative imitation of the two languages,which requires translators to take into account both the recognition mechanism and the interactive experience with reality,thus helping spread Shaanxi literature and increase the wide acceptance of Shaanxi prose by target language readers.