An Investigation Into Essay Translation From The Perspective Of Situation Models

By combining the framework of situation model theory with essay translation, this study aims to find out the influence of some characteristics in essay translation to translation quality from the perspective of emotional color and coherence. Situations models are mental representations of the state of affairs depicted in a text. And they are mental representations of the people, objects, locations, events, and actions in a text. Such mental representations are involved in language comprehension and memory retrieval. The construction of a coherent situation model can be considered as the successful comprehension of a text.By comparing and analyzing the predicate- argument schema in the source text and target text, and then comparing the situation models in two texts from the perspective of space, time, causality which are three dimensions of situation models, the thesis attempts to find out whether the target text conveys the meaning of the source text or not from the perspective of emotional state and coherence. If both the source-language readers and the target-language readers construct the same situation models, the translation would be a successful one.A conclusion can be drawn from the comparative study.(1) Zhang’s translated version is more accurate and precise in emotional state of predicates, and most predicates can convey the emotion expressed by the author well.(2) Zhang Peiji’s translation is more fluent and coherent on the whole.Besides, Zhang takes fully account of time, space and causation, and different translation methods are used to deal with the difference between two languages, which makes translation more coherent.(3) Emotional state of predicates and coherence has certain effect on translation quality. Thus, from the perspective of emotional state and coherence, Zhang Peiji’s translated version is more successful.Thus translators must bridge the language and cultural differences and make the target-language readers receive the same message that received by the source-language readers during text comprehension by reconstructing situation models in another language and culture setting.