A Study On English Versions Of Juxtaposition Images In Wang Wei’s Poems From The Perspective Of Langacker’s Imagery Theory

Wang Wei, a famous poet in the Tang Dynasty, attracts more and more scholarsat home and abroad to commit themselves to studying the English translations of hispoems; however, the previous perspectives of research are relevance theory, aestheticof reception, foreignization and so on. In light of this, this thesis adopts a new andchallengeable perspective—the imagery theory of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammarwhich mainly refers to the four parameters: selection, perspective, prominence andspecificity, and this thesis selects the juxtaposition images of Wang Wei’s poems as itsresearch objects in order to make a pioneering study and enrich the researches onWang Wei’s poems. By means of some empirical approaches: statistical induction,descriptive translation study, comparative study as well as some tables and figures,this thesis has found out that Wang Wei’s poems are suffused with many juxtapositionimages which can be divided into nine types, and that Langacker’s imagery theory canbe applied to the analysis of English translations of these juxtaposition images. On thebasis of comparative studies of English translations of these juxtaposition imagesunder the guidance of the imagery theory of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, twolevels of translation principles are proposed: horizontal dimension—the maximumsimilarity of images, and vertical dimension—translator’s subjectivity. Meanwhile,two translation strategies are put forward, namely, combination of creativity andimitation, equivalence between cognitive images and real cognizance. With these newfindings, this thesis is conducive to widening the study perspectives of research onEnglish translations of Wang Wei’s poems and increasing the explanatory power ofLangacker’s imagery theory.