A Cognitive Linguistic Approach To The Translation Of Chinese Ancient Poetry

The aim of the thesis is to apply cognitive linguistics, especially the principle of salience to the translation of Chinese ancient poetry. Chinese ancient poetry is the gem of Chinese literature,particularly noted for its simplicity, subtleness and its rich connotation. The noticeable features of Chinese ancient poetry are rich in images and the appealing imagery, which embodied not only the particular linguistic structure in the poetic text but also its internal cognitive mechanism.For the sake of the application of cognitive theories to the translation of Chinese ancient poetry, it's necessary to make clear the fundamental theory and the core thought of cognitive linguistics at first. An overview about cognitive linguistics is firstly presented, a brief discussion on the relation between cognitive linguistics and translation studies is made, and special attention on the introduction of the principle of salience is paid. Salience is described as the process of assigning prominence to certain elements of a scene. It is much determined by the individual's psychological viewing arrangement and attention distribution in the certain cognitive scope.The cognitive theory, especially the principle of salience, can be reflected in the relation between image and imagery in Chinese ancient poetry. Through the cognitive analysis of the source texts and the target texts, we can analyse the thinking process of translators in deep going way, and understand the possibility to reproduce the original image and imagery in the translation of Chinese ancient poetry. This thesis introduced the image and imagery in detail, and carefully classified the images in Chinese ancient poetry. By making use of the principle of salience, the last part is a case study of imagery and artistic conception in the poems Shan Ju Qiu Ming and Feng Qiao Ye Po, as well as their translations.