Studies On Conceptual Integration In Translation

The theory of the conceptual blending is firstly systemized and theorized by Fauconnier in the1990s. It, based upon and developed from Lakoff's theory of the conceptual metaphor, abandoning the one-sided and static study strategies of the traditional functional linguistics in the real meaning, mainly focuses on the overall and dynamic linguistic study, which contributes to another important development of linguistics in history. Fauconnier (1994/2002), considering human mental spaces as input spaces, studies the mapping process and the selective projection of elements between two different input spaces, and try to build a new emergent structure by composition, completion and elaboration in order to reveal new ideas not existing in the original input spaces and uncover secrets hidden behind the complicated cognitive phenomena.The theory of the conceptual blending has been applied widely in many fields. The theory of translation studies has access to many great achievements, such as, Nida's principle of equivalent effect, Newmark's semantic translation and communicative translation, Venuti's domestication and foreignization, etc, all of which have a great influence on the development of translation studies in history and most of which focus on keeping the equivalence with the source language and the target language. But the application of the traditional translation strategies, such as Nida's and Newmark's principles, always depends on translators'own subjective experiences and belongs to their cognitive behaviors. This article, combining the theory of the conceptual blending and the theory of translation studies, explaining human translating behaviors from the cognitive point of view through the concrete analysis of many English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation examples, especially some literary cases, points out that translation could never be considered as the seesaw match between the source language and the target language, and in fact is the cognitive blending process in our inner world for the purpose of digging out the explicative and implicative meaning in translation and achieving the ultimate loyalty to the source text.This article, shifting from the traditional four-categorized models of conceptual integration networks (simplex networks, mirror networks, single-scope networks and double-scope networks) and based on Bache's theory, develops the three-categorized models of the conceptual integration and disintegration which contribute to the significant development in the researching field of translation studies. At the same time, it also emphasizes the importance of the fifth space (the background space or the cultural space) during the process of translation. A translating process could not be separated from the integration of background spaces because translators/interpreters usually take into consideration of cognitive frames of input spaces and inner corresponding default values, some social culture and emotional factors in order to reveal its hidden meaning and further explicitize it. The five-space model of the conceptual blending theory is the inheritance and development of the traditional four-space model. It, combining with the translation studies, means a completely new way by which human translation process could be explained cognitively, and is likely to have a great encouraging and meaningful influence on the further research of translation studies and practice.