A Comparative Study On The English Translations Of Tang Poetry By Willis Barnstone And Xu Yuanchong

Guided by the cognitive linguistic view on translation, this thesis sets out to make a tentative comparative study on the English translations of Tang poetry by Willis Barnstone and Xu Yuanchong.The great cause of translating Tang poetry has undergone over one hundred years, and scholars have never ceased doing researches on it. However, most studies are concerned about the translation of Tang poetry from cultural perspectives or traditional philological views. This thesis, different from those appraisal or demonstrative analyses, will approach the translation of Tang poetry from a new perspective—a cognitive linguistic perspective.This thesis first states briefly the development of cognitive linguistics and discusses the inevitability of its emergence;it also expounds the primary principles and major viewpoints of the philosophical basis of cognitive linguistics—embodied philosophy, and its inspiration to translation studies. Then, the thesis makes an elucidation about the cognitive model of translation constructed by Prof. Wang Yin. Such a model sees translation in terms of both multiple interactions among subjects with differently embodied backgrounds and a good mastery of the various meanings of the original discourse. These meanings then get mapped and re-expressed in the target language, resulting in the depiction of the reality world and the cognitive world. Taking into consideration all three factors, i.e., author, text, reader, in communication, this model ensures the harmony in translation. Based on the understanding of the model, this thesis proposes that translators, as subjects of cognition, who share similar objective world and may have similar or diverse thinking as those of the original author, may yield similar or different understandings of the same source text based on their own experience and cognition, and in the process of translation, their creativity may be brought into play. As a result of multiple interactions among subjects of cognition and the source language and the target language, the cognitive world and reality world depicted in the translations may be similar to or different from those of the source text.As Willis Barnstone and Xu Yuanchong are regarded as subjects of cognition, their cognitive worlds including their translation thoughts are sorted out through studies which have revealed the respective cognitive worlds of the two translators developed on thesimilar cognitive basis.In order to study the translation of Tang poetry from the cognitive linguistic view, the thesis in the fifth chapter points out the four indispensable elements of interpreting poetry from the cognitive linguistic view, namely ideorealm, image, sound effect and form. Then Wang Wei's three poems and their translations produced by Willis Barnstone and Xu Yuanchong are analyzed and compared in detail from those four aspects, probing into the multiple interactions among subjects of cognition, the reality world, the source language and target language and examining the reproduction of the reality world and cognitive world of the source text.This thesis will provide a new perspective to researches on the translation of Tang poetry, enhance the understandings of the similarities and diversities between Chinese and Occidental cultures and shed some light on the translation thoughts of two representatives of Tang poetry translators.