A Study On The Discourse Coherence Of English Translation Of Chinese Poetry From The Perspective Of Conceptualization Construal

As a core concept of discourse analysis, discourse coherence has received more andmore attention from linguists, and has increasingly become the focus of research. Manylinguists at home and abroad have put forward different theories to describe and interpret itfrom different perspectives. As a complex discourse phenomenon, discourse coherence notonly concerns about the discourse cohesion, but also pays attention to factors outside the text,such as pragmatics, social and cultural context, cognitive mode and psychological factors etc.In recent years, in the effect of functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics expands thestudy from words to the discourse level. The domestic scholar Wang Yin puts forward thecognitive world analysis methods of discourse coherence, embodied philosophy as thefoundation, using the fundamental cognitive mode to analyze the discourse coherence andmaking up for the deficiencies and limitations of cognitive linguistics in the discourse level,thereby providing a unified and efficient model for the analysis of various levels of language.So far, it is not uncommon for applying discourse coherence to translation theory andpractice, but the analyses of discourse coherence mostly focus on utterance discourse orEnglish translation of novel, little research on the analysis of poetry discourse. Poetry is aspecial language form, belonging to the edge of discourse coherence. The most significantfeature of poetry lies in lacking of cohesion, instead it increases its connotation with implicitcoherence. The more obscure the coherence is, the more cognitive efforts readers need.Conceptualization construal puts forward that the process of dynamic construal ofmeaning is the process of conceptualization according to the integration of concept,conceptualization and the dynamic construal of meaning. Therefore, the dynamic construal ofmeaning is essentially a kind of conceptualization construal（Cruse and Croft,2004）. Asconstrual is one of the important cognitive ability for people’s conceptualization of experienceand language. Conceptualization construal is substantially a construal on concept,emphasizing the process of construal and human being’s subjectivity, focusing on themodification and update of the original concepts and the input of new concepts. This papermainly uses three dimensions of conceptualization construal for the study of discoursecoherence. The encyclopedic knowledge will be activated to build deep relations betweenconcepts in language use through domain so as to interpretate discourse coherence.Perspective has a general force of discourse. It determines the interpretation of the mentalprocess of information organization. Salience can effectively connect the concrete conceptsand the abstract concepts to build a coherent discourse. All the three dimensions mentioned above are used to construct discourse coherence by relating the discourse linguistic form withthe previous knowledge stored in humans’ mind, thus conceptualization construal is adynamic method for the analysis of discourse coherence.In this paper, taking the perspective of cognitive linguistics, based on theconceptualization construal theory, choosing the English versions of Li Bai’s poems as data,by qualitative analysis methods, the discourse coherence is discussed respectively from theview of conceptualization construal, that is, domain, perspective and salience, trying toexplore the feasibility and effectiveness of the discourse coherence of English translation ofLiBai’s poems.