Study Of The Translation Through Visualization In The Story Of The Stone From The Cognitive Linguistic View

The philosophy basis of cognitive linguistics is embodied philosophy, according to which the language system of human beings is not self-governing but a system inseparable from one’s experience and perception; linguistic competence is also not an independent system but a part of the general cognitive competence of human beings. According to cognitive linguistics, meaning derives from interactive cognition between human beings and the objective world, from the users’understanding of the external world rather than confined to language itself. To be more explicitly, meaning is independent from linguistic forms and constructed by some complicated cognitive operating on the basis of extensive encyclopedic knowledge and the actual applied context.As an intricate communicative activity, translation is not only interaction between the source language and target language, but also in nature a cross-culture practice in which the translator are required to comprehend meanings of source text on the foundation of their experience and cognition. However, cognitive ability grows up from our experience and perception of the world which is universal to all human beings, and at the same time it can also be diverse and creative to individuals. Therefore, translation will be subjective and creative.In translation practice, sorts of problems would appear due to the interference and limitation of linguistic forms. Meanwhile, translation is far more than interactions on the language level but in nature intercultural communication. As a result of the complexity and extensiveness of culture, the cultural loss and cultural conflict will arise in translating process, which would restrict translatability of the source text and produce anti-translatability. Hence, translators have to take full advantage of their cognitive ability to achieve creative translation when confronting those challenges.Visualization, as a stage of cognition or an approach to reach cognitive aim, can be helpful in the process of translating for the translator to achieve creative translation. During meaning construction course of both source context and target context, the translator would conduct visualization consciously or unconsciously on the foundation of his encyclopedia knowledge of the world as well as the effects of current context, and then related cognitive frames are activated which further trigger off their corresponding scenes. By taking notions of cognitive linguistics as heuristic approach, the cognitive route of visualization can be well observed and analyzed.This Thesis, by utilizing cognitive notions like prototype and scenes-and-frames semantics as heuristic means and taking The Story of Stone for case study, provides us with a new perspective to observe and analysize how translators produce creative translation by translation through visualization. Meanwhile, when confronted with cultural anti-translatability, visualization can be utilized as a means for conducting cultural transplantation, so as to promote communication between Chinese civilization and other civilizations of the entire world.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion, the main body of this thesis consists of three chapters:The Introduction can be considered as a part for literature view, which gives a brief overview on how translation through visualization was introduced into the field of translation studies and what research achievements has been obtained as well as the study statement both in domestic and oversea.The first chapter presents theoretical foundation of this thesis. There are two parts included:one is the statement of definition of translation through visualization under the cognitive view; the other is presentation of means for translation through visualization, or to be more specifically, is the theoretical basis of how to explain visualization operation in translating by taking notions of prototype and scenes-and-frames semantics as heuristic means. The second chapter is case analysis. By utilizing the cognitive notions mentioned above, taking Hawkes’s translation of Hong Lou Meng--The Story of the Stone as study objective, this part observes and analyzes how visualization is operated by the translator during translating process from three aspects-they are visualization based on physically visible pictures, visualization based on detailed description and visualization based on specific context as well.The third chapter discusses a long existing problem in translation--Cultural anti-translatability, and then presents the complementary measure--transplantation by means of visualization.From the analysis above, the author draws the conclusion that although proposed as a teaching means for translation, the operation of visualization during translating indeed is necessary and meaningful for translators to achieve creative translation. Owing to abstractness and complexity of cognitive categories as well as the long standing cultural anti-translatability, we would absolutely encounter certain troubles when applying visualization analysis into practice, yet translation through visualization still has bright prospects in translation studies.