A Study On The Dynamic Construal Operations Of English Translation Of Metonymies In Sunrise From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

In traditional rhetoric, metonymy is just regarded as a kind of figure of speech with literary character in an auxiliary modified position and used to enhance the effect of language expression. In the late 1970 s, cognitive linguistics emerged and developed, which brought change to metonymy from the 1990 s. With the development of the studies of metonymy, the idea that metonymy is a cognitive style commonly in human daily thinking and action has been gradually accepted.In literary language and daily language, a lot of metonymic phenomena are involved.The research results of metonymy from the perspective of cognitive linguistics are abundant,such as the nature, the cognitive mechanism, the classification of metonymy, etc. However,the results of the studies on metonymy translation by using the theory of cognitive linguistics are fewer.Among all the theories of cognitive linguistics, the theory of construal can be used to explain the cognitive process of translation. Translation is a kind of dynamic cognitive activity in essence. Construal is a primary way of human cognition, which is the term proposed by Langacker(1987) in the theory of cognitive grammar. It refers to “We have the ability to construe the same situation in many different ways”(Langacker, 1987:361), and its importance is that it is the only way to form concept and semantic structure, and express language. Therefore, construal is essential in the process of translation including the understanding of the source text and translation. Construal can be described from five dimensions, namely, scope, background, perspective, prominence and specificity.The drama Sunrise is a four-act drama taking the city life of old China in the 1930 s as the background, which criticizes the dark society characterized by "exploiting the poor to support the rich". In the drama Sunrise with Chinese cultural connotation, there are abundant metonymic expressions in its dialogs close to daily language, reflecting the universality of metonymy. At present, the only one official English version of Sunrise we can find is Barnes’ s version published by Foreign Language Press in July 1960.Based on Langacker’s theory of construal in cognitive linguistics, this thesis utilizes the drama Sunrise and its English version as research data to apply the theory of construal to metonymy translation. With the qualitative research method, this thesis specifically analyzes how the five dimensions of construal including scope, background, perspective, prominence and specificity are displayed in the process of translating Chinese metonymy to English, so as to illustrate that the theory of construal has explanatory power to the cognitive process of translating Chinese metonymy to English, and to further explore the strategies for translatingChinese metonymy to English.