A Study Of The Construal Differences In Chinese-English Translation

Cognitive Linguistics is a new discipline emerged from the late70s and early80s in20thcentury, it proposed exploring the manifestation of different cognitive abilities in languageand the cognitive modes behind language through bodily experience and cognition. CognitiveLinguistics is closely related to many disciplines, and it provides new theoretical perspectivesfor the research of translation, one of which is construal theory. In the light of cognitivelinguistics, construal is one of the core aspects of meaning construction and expression, and itis the ability to conceive and portray the same situation in different ways, which displaysmore or less differences between different users, thus it can help attain a better understandingof the relationship between the speaker and the situation that he conceptualizes and describes.Different translators might enforce different construal on the same scene verbalized by theoriginal language. Langacker adopts “imagery” firstly and then “construal” to demonstratepeople’s cognitive ability of observing and describing the scene in different ways. So far,there are three main viewpoints on the classification of construal, Talmy, Croft&Cruse，Langacker. Langacker (1999) describes construal from the following five aspects: specificity,scope, background, perspective and salience. In2000, he drops “background” and retainsscope, perspective, prominence, and specificity as the construal components, which will beselected in this study as a framework, and they reveal the differences of subjectivity.The object of this study is the English translation of poetry in Three Kingdoms, which isone of the four great classics in ancient China. The study selected two versions, one is fromMoss Roberts and another is from C.H. Brewitt-Taylor. Roberts’ version today is very popularand widely studied, and Taylor’s version is the first full English translation of ThreeKingdoms. Both of them are representative to a certain degree. As for research methods,theoretical description, text analysis, and example verification will be used. Based oncognitive linguistics, the study selects construal theory as framework and objectivelyexamines the translator’s choice according to four dimensions of construal, throughcomparative analysis of poetry translation in two versions of Three Kingdoms. The study triesto provide empirical evidence to different construal to the original, and explores the feasibilityand explanatory power of construal theory in the process of understanding and translation,and the translation strategies will be given accordingly.