The Issue Of Form-meaning Pairing In Translation Practice Within The Framework Of Construction Grammar

The issue of form-meaning matching has been long discussed in the academia.There is no doubt that conveying meaning is the key to translation. However, differenttranslators may choose different forms to express the same meaning of the sourcelanguage, thus producing different effects on TL readers. An inappropriate form alwaysleads to an unfaithful translation output. The paper uses the Construction Grammar asthe theoretic framework to study the issue of form-meaning pairing in translation. TheConstruction Grammar as one of the latest cognitive linguistic branches suggests thatform itself has meaning, and sentence or discourse meaning does not result from thesimple addition of lexical meanings. Meaning is mapped out onto the surface structureby means of the Construction Coercion strategy which is the prominent feature of theConstruction Grammar. This strategy assigns extra meaning to the words within aconstruction. The Discourse Construction Coercion strategy lends support to pragmaticlinguistics and discourse translation in particular. This paper first offers a diachronicreview of relevant research on the issue of form-meaning matching in translation. Then,it examines and analyzes different constructions in English and Chinese, including theDitransitive Construction, the Resultative Construction and the Caused-MotionConstruction. Finally, it moves on to testify the generalizability of the ConstructionGrammar to the context of translation through a case study of translation facts.