A Study On Addition In Yao Naiqiang’s Translation Of The Great Gatsby From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

The Great Gatsby, called a classic in American literature, has been translated intodifferent Chinese versions and studied by many scholars since introduced into China.Two important translations which researchers are quite concerned to are Chinese versionstranslated by Yao Naiqiang and Wu Ningkun, respectively. Using different theoreticalperspectives, researchers have analyzed and elaborated translation phenomena in thesetwo Chinese translations and made some fruitful research results. These studies aremainly from the perspective of linguistics perspective, philosophical perspective,reception aesthetics perspective, psychological perspective, narrative and literarystylistics perspective, to study the translation phenomena of these two Chinese translatedversions. Studies of translation phenomena include study of translator s subjectivity,study of translation strategies, character translation study, equivalence translation study,study of character dialogue translation, study of operation principle of literal translationand liberal translation, translation criticism study and style transfer study. These studiescover a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, explain many types of translationphenomena in Chinese versions of The Great Gatsby and provide inspiration for furtherresearches related to its translations, to some extent.In this paper, Construal of cognitive linguistics theory is applied to the study onaddition in Yao Naiqiang s translation of The Great Gatsby on the basis of previousresearches. Construal theory emphasizes people s subjective factors in the process offorming concepts, semantic structures and language expressions and mainly includes fivedifferent dimensions: the degree of detail when looking at things, different cognitive andcontext backgrounds, different perspectives of observing things, different choices fordomains and highlighting of different focus of attention. In this paper, the fivedimensions of this theory are used to analyze the addition of different types which can beclassified into two aspects: the addition of cultural content (cultural idioms and allusions;rhetorical content) and the addition of composition of text (semantic expression;description of event) and rationality of the selected instances with additions is discussed.Construal theory analyzes the cognitive mechanisms in detail when the translator addstranslations. That is what kind of construal way translator uses when he adds thetranslated content, and discussion about whether the content of the added translation isreasonable. Construal theory emphasizes that semantics has subjective imagery in nature.Different forms of language structures represent different ways of subjective construal and contain different semantic contents. The application of cognitive theory providesnew research perspectives for translation studies and a useful inspiration for manycontroversial issues with long-term existence in translation studies, to some extent.Interdisciplinary studies including cognitive translation study have also formed anddeveloped successively.A study on addition in this paper from the perspective of Construal theory reflectspractical significance of cognitive theory in translation studies. The relationship amonglanguage, perception and reality in this study has also been interpreted well. Humancognitive abilities based on experience from reality have important influence onformation of language.