Conceptual Blending Theory And Sonnet Translation

Poetry translation is always one of the difficult areas in the field of translation studies. For years, scholars and translators have tried to grapple with the intricacies that the literary genre has engendered to its translation, not without productive strategies and suggestive theories. Generally speaking, theorists and practitioners can be divided into two groups:"literal translation group" and "free translation group" when their concerns are mainly on relations between form and content. William Shakespeare’s sonnets, for their strict rhyme, rich images and rhetorical devices, can be a great challenge to anyone who attempts to explicate the formal as well as thematic complexities of the poems. Difficulties have not deterred the worldwide community of enthusiastic translators, though. Only in China, there are more than12scholars who have published translations of Shakespeare s Sonnets. We need, then, to rethink of the traditional theory as in the binary approach to poetry translation and move beyond by considering cognitive factors in the translation process. To this end, recent development in cognitive theory is helpful in studying the mental process as translation involves.Translation is a special linguistic activity, which cannot be separated from human cognition. Traditionalists in translation studies view translation as the process to convey the meaning from source text to target text, while, cognitive theorists regard translation as a conceptual blending process. Fauconnier’s conceptual blending theory as a cognitive approach to translation has given rise to the network model of translation, which corresponds to the four spaces in conceptual blending theory, namely source text space, translator’s space, generic space and translation space. Translation space blends the projections of the other three spaces. As a result, the target text is formed in translation space.This thesis applies Fauconnier’s seminal theory to a study of Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Tu An, Gu Zhengkun and of Cao Minglun, and compares the former two versions while taking Cao Minglun’s translation as partial reference. Through comparing the translations, this thesis singles out three types of blending that are prominent in the Chinese cases:linguistic code oriented blending, mental space oriented blending and compound blending.In conclusion, this thesis suggests that literal translation and free translation are inseparable in the translation process. If the translation does not aim at conveying the cultural connotations or the rhetorical devices, translators should choose linguistic code oriented blending in order to be faithful to the source text. On the other hand, if the translation attends to cultural connotations, then mental space oriented blending and compound blending should be applied. From the perspective of conceptual blending theory, poetry translation requires the combination of the three types of blending. Dealing with different wording strategies in the poetry, translators should choose the proper blending in order to achieve faithfulness and expressiveness.