A Study On English Translations Of Imagery In Chinese Classical Poetry

Chinese Classical Poetry already has hundreds of years'histories. On the basis of the practice, the translators or translation researchers have advanced theories from various approaches. These approaches can be roughly divided into three parts: linguistic approach, cultural approach and poetic approach. Based on Palmer's cultural linguistics and combining language and culture factor, this dissertation have a study on translation of imagery in Chinese Classical Poetry.In his book Toward A Theory of Cultural Linguistics(1996),Gary Palmer applied cognitive linguistics directly to three traditional approaches that are central to linguistic anthropology:Boasian linguistics, Ethnosemantics, and the ethnography of speaking,and he named this synthesis cultural linguistics.Palmer proposed cultural linguistics as a new approach towards the way language works . The most distinguished feature of this approach is that it lays emphasis on imagery again.Imagery refers not only to visual images,but also images we get from all our perceptual organs.It is a complex cognitive item,which includes specific images as well as other relevant but more abstract cognitive concepts such as schema and script, etc..Cultural linguistics,by its very essence,is a theory of mental imagery.It seeks to understand how speakers deploy speech and listeners understand it through kinds of imagery.It takes that language is the play of verbal lymbols that are based in imagery which is virtually structured by culture.Imagery, language,culture and their relations form the core of cultural linguistics.Poetry is the essence of language, and imagery is the soul of poetry. On the basis of Palmer's cultural linguistics and English translation of Chinese classical poetry, this dissertation makes a comparatively systematic study on the transference of imagery in C-E translation of Chinese classical poetry from the angle of its translatability, translation principles and strategies, and the result shows that the English translation of imagery in Chinese classical poetry can be regarded as the basic unit for both semantic level and aesthetic level, give full consideration to the target language's cultural acceptance, and find the best balance between the Chinese culture's spread and the translation's wide acceptance.