An Analytical Study On English Translation Of Chinese Idioms Describing Female Beauty From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Idioms are the essences of a nationality's language storage,carrying heavy national characteristics,unique linguistic charms and profound cultural sentiments.In the long Chinese history of using idioms,a part of them were specially created to describe the beauty in females.Although there aren't many idioms of beauty,compared to the total amount the idioms,idioms describing female beauty reflect the varied aesthetic values of ancient Chinese people and splendid performing power of the Chinese language.With the globalization speeding up,cross-cultural communication is becoming an important part in modern people's life.As a crucial means of the cross-cultural communication,translation is attracting more and more scholars' attention.Traditional theories have seen translation as an objective convey from the source language to the target language,searching for the same linguistic expressions between different cultural backgrounds.These views on one side tend to neglect the fact that translation itself is a dynamics constrained by several elements;on the other side they pay less attention on the translators' subjectivity and their cognition during the translation process.As the development of cognitive science,especially after the raising of Conceptual Integration Theory by Fauconnier& Turner(1994,1998),a translator's subjectivity is becoming a popular topic.Translation starts to be seen as a process consists of for spaces, i.e.two input spaces(the source text space and the translator space),projected from a genetic space and integrate in a blend space(the target text space).The translator firstly de-integrate the conceptual structures conveyed by the original writer with its linguistic construction in the source language context;then re-blend the de-integrated information, combined with his/her own linguistic capability,pragmatic consideration,self-preference as well as the cognitive context(including the inner target language grammar ) into the final expression in the target language context.What should be noted is that some optimality principles,such as the topology principle,the integration principle and the web principle, function as the constraining elements during the integration.The vitality of the theoretical study lies in its application and practice.This thesis applies the Conceptual Integration Theory in the analysis of the English translations of Chinese idioms describing female beauty for two purposes:one is to testify the feasibility of Conceptual Integration Theory;the other is to provide a systematical framework for the Chinese idioms translation and to better the English readers' understanding of the splendid Chinese aesthetic expressions as well as its unique value.According to Conceptual Integration Theory,the author divide the translating process of Chinese idioms describing female beauty to two steps:the de-integrating of the original idiom from the Chinese language and the re-blending of the information in English language.The second step can be further divided to frame network,a one-sided network and a two-sided network,depending the corresponding relationship between the conceptual structures.In the final part of the thesis,the author suggests some applicative implications for the translators in their future work.Although Conceptual Integration Theory has been applied by many scholars to the practice of translation,few of these thesis have been used or applied in the study of Chinese idioms,especially the idioms describing beauties.The hope is to provide some enlightment on the application of Conceptual Integration Theory in detailed linguistic study.