A Study On Image Reproduction In English Translation Of Classical Chinese Literature From The Perspective Of Palmer’s Cultural Linguistics

The American linguistic anthropologist Gary. B. Palmer synthesized theCognitive linguistics with the three traditions of linguistic anthropology:Boasian linguistics, Enthnosemantics and Ethnography of Speaking byassimilating, modifying and reajusting, and managed to serve a betterapproach named cultural linguistics to explain various linguisticphenomenon. As Palmer considered that language, culture and images areattached to one another and adopted imagery as the core concept in hiscultural linguistic theories, to some extent, translation as a cross-culturalbehavior which is aiming to build a bridge of understanding amongdifferent cultures can be operated with the help of Palmer’s CulturalLinguistics.Caigen Tan which was written during Wanli region period in MingDynasty is a book of aphorisms in essay form. The book absorbed thephilosophy of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, converging the soulof the three schools with the author’s own kid-gloved attitude towardself-cultivation and the way of conducting oneself in society. In recentyears, Caigen Tan enjoys high favor among the people from every concernof the world with the spreading of classical Chinese literature. In this case,plenty of translated versions of this classic comes into being. This thesis, grounding on Palmer’s cultural linguistics and its coreconcept of images, manages to illustrate how to reproduce the images intranslation. The study figures out that the four principles of images incultural linguistics such as perceptual equivalence, spatial equivalence,structural equivalence, and transformational equivalence play a mostimportant role in guiding the translation procedures of classical Chineseliterature. This thesis at the same time shows that during the process ofimage reproduction, the translator of Caigen Tan preferred to keep theoriginal images when it came to the cultural-shared images; however, asfor the cultural specific ones, the translator tended to adopt thetransformed-image translation, annotation and liberal translation strategies.All in all, the thesis tries to explore an available approach to transmitabundant images in classical Chinese literature more exactly, hoping toprovide a beneficial result to the translation of the Chinese classics andpromote a better transmission of Chinese traditional culture.