Information Decoding And Encoding In Translating Process

During the twentieth century, many translation theories emerged, most of which took semantics as the focus to explain the translation activity. Of course, these translation theories also have their own different emphases, for instance, Nida's translation theory emphasizes the functional equivalence between the source language and target language; Newmark's theory lays its emphasis on semantic and communicative translation; Gutt borrows the relevance theory from pragmatics to explain translation activity while Bell tries to explain the translation process with models. However, all these mentioned theories and the other don't apply cognitive linguistics to account for the translation activity.Cognitive linguistics plays a very important role in modern linguistic research because language is not only the tool for human beings to understand this world, but also the product of people's cognition. From this point of view, it is quite necessary to study language from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Translation is not only one important part of language study, but also a vital means for communications between two different cultures. Therefore the author tends to explain the information decoding and encoding in translating process from the perspective of cognitive linguistics in this paper.First of all, the author briefly describes some influential translation theories and schools in modern times and specifies their main concerns in their theories. Based on such descriptions, the author comes to the conclusion that not a single translation theory is conducted from a cognitive point of view completely. On this basis, the author thinks that it will be a new subject that the translating process is explained with the help of cognitive linguistic theory. Then in the following chapters and sections the author specifies in detail in this respect.First, the author presents several important concepts of cognitive linguistics, and then analyzes the relationship among language, thinking and cognition. These are the important basis for the main discussion. In Chapter Four, the author explains in detail how to apply the cognitive linguistic theory to decode the information contained in the source language texts, including the lexical, syntactical and discourse information decoding, and a special section is devoted to the cognitive explanation of metaphors. In this chapter, many concepts in cognitive linguistics are presented such as category, the basic level category, figure/ground segregation, framing theory, schema and script theory, mapping of cognitive conceptual domain and so on. The description of information encoding (in Chapter Five) is briefly provided because the encoding process is similar to that of information decoding. At last, in Chapter Six, the author offers an example to show how to apply the cognitive linguistic knowledge to translation practice.This paper is only an initial attempt to explain the translating process, especially the information decoding in translating process, with the help of cognitive linguistics, therefore some ideas or points are surely not mature. Further improvements and valuable suggestions are needed and appreciated.