A Study On The English Translation Of The Art Of War From The Perspective Of Lexical Field And Frame Semantics

Lexical field theory and frame semantics are two theories that are often compared with each other in the semantic field. According to lexical field, any word item in a language belongs to one lexical system. There is no item can exist alone without other items. When the items combine a big unit, it is called a lexical field. A small lexical field is the sub-field of a big one. While frame semantics allows the word exist alone, all against a frame which describes a "small scene" about the word's semantic meaning. The "small scene" is the frame of the word. Words that have commons in their semantic meanings share the same frame. And words are connected all through frames.In the thesis, each of the two theories will be applied into two English versions of The Art of War to compare the translations. Lexical field deals with the words' definitions by the way using the word in the higher level of a lexical field to define the word of its sub-field because any word in the lower level or in the sub-field has all the features of the word higher than it, and the semantic meaning of the word in the higher level includes the word's semantic meaning lower than it. And frame semantics could deal with the words in the same level of a lexical field by deciding whose frame matches the whole text's better. And frame semantics could also be applied to the whole text to check if the text is coherent.According to this research, the blending of the two theories could be applied better into the English translation of The Art of War, and it could give a new perspective to the translation of a new English version.