A Study On The English Translation Of Homesick Emotional Image In Tang Poems Based On Image-schema

Cognitive linguistics as a focus in the linguistic theory in recent years has a very wide research space. The term “schema” is a notion which was put forward by German philosopher Kant in 1781. It is the picture or the scene emerged in one’s mind when people read some information. While the “image-schema” was put forward by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, which mainly focuses on the application of the cognition of the outside world to the cognition of abstract things. It is the important way to know about the world for human beings as a major theory for cognitive linguistics. Image-schema is a basic cognitive structure which comes from people’s interaction with the world in daily life. It helps us form a kind of visible schema in our mind to understand the abstract conception based on the specific image.Translation is not the equivalence in two language symbols, especially for the English translation of Chinese classical poems. Since there are big differences between Chinese culture and western culture, the knowledge background and the image-schema formed in people’s mind are also different. Image is the soul of the poetry, and the emotional image is the main medium for poets to express their emotions. So translators have to interpret the emotional images of the source language efficiently in order to get satisfactory effects in translation. The homesick emotional images in Tang poems are mainly from homesick poems of Tang dynasty, while the poems cover a major part as a main branch of Chinese classical poetry, which mostly convey the homesick feelings with the method of “attach feelings to the scene”. Therefore, homesick poems of Tang dynasty are full of homesick emotional images.This thesis selects some typical homesick poems of Tang dynasty and the English translations of them translated by Xu Yuanchong, and compares and analyzes the homesick emotional images in homesick poems of Tang dynasty and their English translations from the perspective of image-schema theory. It tries to explore the feasibility and the explanatory power of adopting the image-schema theory for the English translation of homesick emotional images in homesick poems of Tang dynasty, so as to give some translation strategies. It hopes to provide some implications for the English translation of Chinese classical poetry. Through the comparison between the homesick emotional images in homesick poetry of Tang dynasty and Xu Yuanchong’s English versions, the thesis finds that the image-schema theory not only can be used in the English translation of homesick emotional images but also has a strong power to explain the translation. At the same time, the suggested translation strategies according to the image-schema have a strong instructive guidance to the English translation of homesick poetry.