Conceptual Thinking And Translating

Concept is the basic construction unit of human thinking. What every science uses to reflect the universal relationship and a certain nature of the world is scientific concepts. Any scientific thinking is conceptual thinking. As one of the branches of scientific thinking, translation thinking belongs undoubtedly to conceptual thinking. The object of translating is language, which expresses the specific content of human conceptual thinking. We depend on our conceptual thinking when we want to understand or learn something. In essence, every translator constantly utilizes his conceptual thinking in the study of translation theory as well as in translation practice. There only lies a distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness, or rather, many translators are only theoretically unaware that they are making use of their conceptual thinking. Consequently, a study of conceptual thinking is necessary for guiding both translation theory and translation practice.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion, this thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One introduces the definition of concept and its formation and development, with major references to the results of modern cognitive psycholinguistics as well as the viewpoints of traditional logic. The author approves of a dynamic approach to the study of concept.Chapter Two first gives a brief account of conceptual thinking fromthree aspects -- the definition, characteristics, and fundamental laws,and then probes into the mutual relationship one after another between conceptual thinking and language, language and translating, conceptual thinking and translating. They are interwoven with one another , forlanguage is the literal expression of the content of conceptual thinking, while translating transforms one language into another in an appropriate way on the basis of conceptual thinking. Some new results achieved in the study of cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual metaphor and conceptual structure, are borrowed to elucidate the author's viewpoint.Chapter Three copes with the application of conceptual thinking to the translation field, with particular emphasis on demonstrating the application of conceptual thinking in the process of translation practice through the analysis of some examples. As the importance of conceptual thinking exists in the appropriate application of concepts, a criterion for distinguishing the concepts in a sentence, i.e., phrase and clause, is put forward in this chapter, and then the phrase and clause are delimited respectively. As a result, when translating a sentence, first we can differentiate the concepts in it, dig up their conceptual structures, reveal their deep semantic structures, and make clear the relationship between them; then we can organize these concepts in appropriate target language according to logic and their relationship based on the original sentence structure.