A Study On The Translation Strategies Of Images In Poetry From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Poetry is considered as the gem of literature and the essence of language while poetry translation from Chinese to English is a painstaking task. And image is the soul of poetry, playing a crucial role in the composition of poetry. However, image, which serves as a key to the transmission of the beauty in sense of the classical Chinese poetry, also poses great obstacle to its translation.The thesis begins with a summary of the definition of image, a brief review of the statements made by Chinese and western critics and then summarizes the research about the translation of image in poetry made by the previous scholars. Based on the review, the author analyzes the limitations of the previous research and presents the research perspective of this thesis.There are some problems in the previous studies on the translation of image in poetry: the theoretical value of the translation of image has not attracted enough attention; the research on the translation strategies of image is not systematic, mostly focusing on the argument of domestication and foreignization; it concentrates on subjective evaluations of different translations of a single verse with a few theoretical framework. In a word, most researches on image translation are related to prescriptive guiding principles and empirical conclusions, and previous studies belonging to theoretical construction on the English translation of images are rare.This thesis is an attempt to interpret the constructions of images in poetry, to put forward the translation strategies and apply them to the English versions of Chinese poetry by adopting conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and frame theory as the framework. In our study, we prove that conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, frame borrowing, chunking based on frame and sub-frame accounts for the backstage cognition of the interpretation of images.In light of the above findings and the mainstream view of contemporary translation studies, the principle for the translating of images in poetry is proposed: the translator should try to realize both the image of object and its implications in the source language; and if this endeavor fails, s/he should discard the image of object of the source language and convey the implications of image. Thus, the readers in the target text can receive the similar cognitive experience as the readers in the original text. However, if the similar cognitive experience formerly exists, the image of object should be retained. On the basis of this basic principle, six translating strategies are proposed: 1. equivalent reproduction of the metaphorical and metonymic mappings; 2. activation of the metonymic source domain in the target language based on frame chunking sideways; 3. reappearance of the target domain based on frame borrowing and frame chunking up; 4. substitution of frame for subframe based on frame chunking up; 5. augmentation of unique implications of images based on frame borrowing; 6. activation of equivalent frame in the target culture based on frame chunking sideways.