Reproduction&Reconstruction

Once the classical Chinese poetry begin entering into the world of the Englishlanguage, clashes and conflicts brought forth by the linguistic and culturalheterogeneity are ineluctable. Those pangs inflicted upon the English discourse causepeople to reflect apart from doing a huge amount of translation. If translation isregarded as “transmigration” in the traditional Chinese literary theory, the discussionon the “transmigration of Ideorealm” is anything but an easy task to fulfill: poetry ischaracterized by the property of “anti-translatability”. Against such a backdrop, thepresent treatise, adopting “image” as its research object, is targeted at elucidating theconveyance of “Ideorealm” through the linguistic theory of metaphor.The application of the linguistic theory into the study of image translation allowsthe researcher a more objective stand, thus overcoming to the largest possible extentthe irrationality in the field of transition criticism created by researchers’discrepancies in personal knowledge and aesthetic values. By virtue of the freshachievements scored in the domain of linguistics, three spaces of metaphors aredeveloped to approach image translation viz. rhetoric metaphor, cognitive metaphorand grammatical metaphor.Rhetoric metaphor is inarguably the most time-honoured research method forstudying metaphor. Considered as a figure of speech, metaphor is an abnormal modeof language in violation to the conventional limitations on language choice. Underrhetoric metaphor, the focus of Ideorealm conveyance is directed on metaphoricalimage and non-metaphorical image, which equally falls into static image and dynamicimage. The author believes that i) for the translation of metaphorical image,translators are supposed to adopt the strategy of reconstruction for conveyingIdeorealm, while for that of non-metaphorical image, the appropriate strategy isreproduction. ii) As regards the strategy of reconstruction, the structure of image isnot transferred equivalently from Chinese into English. There exists two contraryphenomena: condensation and enlargement.The developments registered in modern linguistics engendered the approach ofcognitive linguistics to the study of metaphor, as a result of which, a novel paradigm —“cognitive metaphor” came into being. Sublating rhetoric metaphor, cognitivemetaphor succeeded in breaking down the barriers of “figure of speech” that hadthwarted the progress of metaphor theory for one thousand odd years since the era ofPlato. It began to be viewed as a human beings’ cognitive method to comprehend theexternal world and a projection across source domain and target domain. Undercognitive metaphor, image is construed as a medium between poetry and Englishreaders that functions as a mechanism for activating Ideorealm. Owing to poetry’slimitation on space, metaphor and image frequently become integrated. This fusion ofmetaphor and image serves for us a unique perspective to observe image translation.Hence a cognitive hypothesis of ideorealm is advanced with a metaphor-image entityas its core constituent. In accordance with this hypothesis, it is essential for translatorsto make a judgment on the entity after weighing metaphor against image. If imagery>metaphor, Ideorealm is semantically reproduced; Conversely, if metaphor> image,what Ideorealm undergoes is metaphorical reconstruction.Hallidayen grammatical metaphor is an important category in system-functionallinguistics which was founded by Halliday. Its difference with rhetoric metaphor andcognitive metaphor lies in that it entails the varied possibilities of realizing meaningby different syntactical structures. Thereupon Halliday maintains that thosegrammatical structures which are close to the ways we perceive and experience theexternal world belong to congruent form, whereas those which are not are inmetaphorical form. Under grammatical metaphor, the translators’ choice of the form isreflective of the their style of conveying Ideorealm. Meanwhile, we believe thatgrammatical metaphor opens up new frontier in the study of translator’s style.After the foregoing metaphorical research of image translation, the end of thispresent study sees the birth of an analytical framework consisting of reproductionstrategy and reconstruction strategy. It is our hope that this framework can provide avaluable reference system for future study on Ideorealm conveyance in classicalChinese poetry translation.