Translation As Cognitive Construal: A Cognitive Approach To The Translation Of Wa

Mo Yan is the first Chinese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His works always employ various literal devices to express profound connotation. As the latest full-length novel of Mo Yan, Frog takes Gugu as the main line to depict human beings' lives in different eras. After being translated by Howard Goldblatt, this book was first published in Australia in 2014, and received numerous praises sequentially. Therefore, the translation of Wa deserves academic attention.Starting from Cognitive Linguistics, this thesis employs cognitive construal as its method to study the translation of Wa. According to Langacker, cognitive construal is the ability to describe the same situation in different ways. It contains five dimensions: scope, background, perspective, salience and specificity. According to Wan Yin, scope and background can be put together. The thesis follows this type of classification and analyzes the English version of Frog from these four dimensions. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the applicability of cognitive construal theory on translation analysis.Based on a detailed analysis to Goldblatt's translation strategies in Frog, this thesis argues that different approaches of cognitive construal will lead to different language expressions. Since the author Mo Yan and the translator Goldblatt come from different cultures, it is inevitable that there should be deviations in their ways of cognitive construal, leading to different English expressions to the same scene or object that is described in Chinese. Therefore, the translator has to choose proper construal ways in his translation to reach the ideal aesthetic effects and reproduce the real world and cognitive world presented by the author.