Cognitive Factors’ Influence Of Cognitive Subjects On Translating Activities From The Perspective Of CLVT

The novel Sister Carrie created by Theodore Dreiser has been regarded as therepresentative work of American realistic novels. It truthfully reflects the influence ofrapid development of social economy on the alienation of human nature in the risingperiod of capitalism. This thesis aims to analyze four Chinese versions of Sister Carriechosen by the author of this thesis based on the embodied interactions of cognitivelinguistic view on translation proposed by Wang Yin, to explore the influence of theinteractive relationships among “person”,“text “and “reality” on the translationactivities.According to cognitive linguistic view on translation (CLVT), translating is acognitive activity based on the embodied backgrounds. The translators with multipleinteractive activities are projected and re-expressed from one language into the targetlanguage. Translation activity is the multiple interactive relations among the reality andthe subjects (author, reader and translator), the original work and the subjects, the targetlanguage and the subjects, the author and the translator, the target text reader and thetranslator. The subjects obtain various abilities and cognitions through the embodiedactivities from the reality. And the reader’s and the translator’s understanding of the textis also based on their experience and cognition of life. They can not infinitely transcendor violate them.This thesis takes cognitive linguistic view on translation as the theoretical basis,using its main characteristics–“multiple embodied interactions and creativity of thecognitive subjects” to analyze the four representative Chinese versions of Sister Carrieso as to show that due to the “differences” of the cognitive subjects’ embodiments,different translators have made different processing methods in their translation process.And different translated versions bring us extraordinary colorful enjoyment. Meanwhile,the comparative study also proves that only one translation of a literary work with richcontents can not meet the different readers’ needs in different times and under differentsocial ideology. As we all know, the comparative study on translation is always carriedbetween two translated texts; however, the author chose four different versions. Thereason is that this thesis mainly studies on cognitive factors’ influence of cognitive subjects on translating activities, so more samples will make the study much morescientific and convincing. In this thesis, examples are illustrated and discussed in termsof word expressions, sentence forms, rhetorical devices, language features as well as thediscrepancies of translation styles to show that the translators have to combine theinteractive relations among the reality, the author, the translator, and the reader closely,and to give fully consideration to the effects of embodiment and cognition. It alsorequires the translators to deal with these relations stated above properly in order to geta better understanding of the translation activity. The study also shows that theapplicability of the cognitive linguistic view on translation in doing research ontranslating foreign literary works, and provides a new approach to translation studies.The author hopes that the study can bring some teaching implications in improving thetranslators’ translation ability. What is more, it can cultivate translators’ embodiedconsciousness, so as to make the ideological content, the characters and language art inthe original be reproduced in translation, and enjoy a higher acceptance in the targetlanguage readers.