Image Translation Study Of Li Shangyin’s Poems From Palmer’s Cultural Linguistic Perspective

Li Shangyin is an undeniable representative of the Late Tang poets. Despite his unsuccessful career and miserable life, he made great achievement in poetry and promoted the Tang Poetry to another peak since the age of Li Bai and Du Fu. The book Li Shangyin’s Poetry:the Chinese Baroque Poet in the Ninth Century was written by the former Stanford American Chinese professor James J. Y. Liu, who enjoyed great fame in the field of comparative literature between China and West. He studied Li Shangyin and his poetry thoroughly from the perspective of comparative poetics; he also selected and translated 100 poems from Li Shangyin’s poetry collection with detailed annotation added behind each poem. The book is considered as a landmark in Li Shangyin study.Based on the three traditions in linguistic anthropology and the newly developed cognitive linguistics, the American linguist Palmer published his monograph of Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. In his book, Palmer borrowed the theories from Roland A. Finke, integrated his own research, and systematically brought up the image understanding theories including the principles of perceptual equivalence, spatial equivalence, transformational equivalence, structural equivalence. He also explained how to apply the principles in real case analysis, which provided a new theory and method for image transmission and understanding.The dissertation studies the 100 Li Shangyin Poem translations in the second chapter of James Liu’s Li Shangyin’s Poetry:the Chinese Baroque Poet in the Ninth Century, it collects and categorizes the images into natural images, images of man-made objects, social images, historical images and mythical images, altogether 1121. The research focuses on the study of the relationships between images and physical objects under the principles of imagery understanding, i.e. perceptual equivalence, spatial equivalence, transformational equivalence, structural equivalence. The research digs into the translation strategies Professor James J. Y. Liu used in his translation, i.e. image-preserving, image-adding, image lost, image-transformed and image paraphrasing, it analyses the reason of their appliance and their positive effect on the conveying of the original imagery.More thorough knowledge on Palmer’s cultural linguistics and James Liu’s Li Shangyin’s Poetry:the Chinese Baroque Poet in the Ninth Century has been obtained with in-depth research of image translation. With detailed image translation analysis of Li Shangyin’s Poems selected from 100 Li Shangyin’s Poetry translated by James Liu, the research stated different translation strategies applied in imagery translation. The analysis with 96 verses as typical examples further proves the imagery principles’value in poetry translation. The study is hopefully served as a reference for future image translation study of Li Shangyin’s Poetry under the cultural linguistics theory.