Conceptual Blending Study On English Translation Of Reduplication In Du Fu’s Poetry:A Case Study Of Stephen Owen’s The Poetry Of Du Fu

Du Fu is the famous realistic poet in China,hailed as “Sage Poet”.His poetry is honored as “poem-history”.The Poetry of Du Fu containing 1400 poems was translated by Stephen Owen,a celebrated American sinologist and published in 2016.It is the first complete English translation version of Du Fu’s poetry with annotation,of great academic value.It is an important medium for the west to know Du Fu’s poetry,objectively helping Du Fu’s poems better into the world.Conceptual blending theory is an important part of cognitive linguistics based on the mental space theory proposed by Gilles Fauconnier,and has been developed and improved by many scholars.In 2020,Wang Yin illustrates the different mapping and projection relations of the elements among the mental spaces,so as to further subdivide the concept integration process.There are a lot of reduplicated words in Du Fu’s poems.Reduplicated words are the important characteristics reflecting artistic conception and Du Fu’s thoughts and feelings,which can enhance the rhythm sensation and the beauty of rhyme.To improve the accuracy and integrity of the research,an English-Chinese bilingual corpus of reduplicated words is built covering 708 manually identified reduplicated words and their translations in The Poetry of Du Fu,which is helpful to compare the source text with the target text intuitively to analyze the differences and connections.In the meantime,it is also a closed corpus,omitting the information of footnotes and additional notes to make the corpus fully in line with the theme of the study.From the perspective of conceptual blending theory and taking the different mapping and projection relationships as the core,the thesis discusses Stephen Owen’s cognitive process and the corresponding translation strategies and methods in translating reduplicated words by the combination of the quantitative and qualitative research methods.Stephen Owen’s cognitive process when translating the reduplicated words in Du Fu’s poems is mainly divided into two categories,namely,the double-space-oriented translation process and the simplex-space-oriented translation process.The double-space-oriented translation process is classified into the complete mapping relationship and the partial mapping relationship while the simplex-space-oriented translation process is classified into the single projection from the poet space or the translator space to the target-text space.It is found that under the different cognitive processes,the translation strategies and methods adopted by Stephen Owen are not the same,and the translation strategies and methods adopted under the same cognitive process have something in common.This thesis discusses Stephen Owen’s cognitive processes and translation strategies and methods in translating the reduplicated words in Du Fu’s poems based on the conceptual blending theory,enriching the existing studies on reduplication translation and the translation of Du Fu’s poetry and expanding the application scope of concept blending theory.In addition,the study on the translation strategies and methods used by Stephen Owen is conducive to providing reference for the translation of Chinese literary works,so as to introduce more Chinese literary works to the world.