| Awareness of crisis refers to an individual's concerns of gains and losses; honor and disgrace; success and failure that are beyond his or her own fate, who cares about the future of the world, society, the country and the people. He or she is vigilant against potential plight or crisis and creating the courage and determination to strive against adversities. It is also an awareness of being prepared for danger in times of safety, a wisdom of Chinese people's survival, a catalyst and motive for the progress as well as rejuvenation of our nation. In history, some promising and responsible literati always connected their own fate with the fate of whole nation, they had profound awareness of crisis. For instance, Du Fu, renowned as “The Sage of Poetry”, constantly worried about his country and people during his short life, which turned out the essence in Du Fu's awareness of crisis. Profound worry for country and people also earned Du Fu's poems the fame “The Epic of Poetry”.Among a sea of researches on the translation of Du Fu's poems, almost none of them pays attention to his awareness of crisis. The author of the thesis tries to adopt Langacker's Cognitive Construal Theory and analyzes the reflection of Du Fu's awareness of crisis from three translations by Xu Yuanchong, Yang Xianyi and Rewi Alley. Construal is an important component of cognitive linguistics and a significant way to know the world of mankind. Applying Cognitive Construal Theory in translation means applying specificity, scope, perspective, background and salience to discuss the subjective procedure in translation.The research content is as follows: 1. Data collection for case analysis. Du Fu's original poems and three translations by Xu, Yang and Rewi should be the data source. The author selected sentences as the epitome of presentation of Du Fu's worry for country and people in 25 poems and their translations as the research object, among which, 9 poems are analyzed by comparative study. 2. The author made a rough classification for the 25 poems: the theme of worry for war; worry for common people; worry for the emperor and worry for fleeting time. The core of the four categories is Du Fu's profound worry for peril, division, poverty, weakness and corruption of his country; as well as for poor people's survival and hardships. Cognitive Construal Theory will be the theoretical guidance for analysis of good reproduction of Du Fu's worry for country and people and causes of failures in translations by the five dimensions.Through a detailed analysis, major findings of the research are shown below: Among the 25 poems, Rewi translated 23 poems but only 9 basically reproduced Du Fu's worry; Xu finished 10 works, merely 3 of them were qualified in delivering Du Fu's awareness of crisis; and Yang also completed 5 works, 3 generally reflected Du Fu's anti-war spirit and worry for the current political situation. Except for a few translations, others of three English versions failed in representing Du Fu's worry for country and people, mainly because of the translators' deviation in the five dimensions when they construed source language. So the thesis proposes that translators might pay more attention to the choice of detailed or general translation; the expansion in related cognitive domains; the selection of perspectives and the understanding of the purpose and ways of salience on certain images in original works, then the translation and original poems are possible to reach the resemblance in spirit. So translators may better translate and convey the essence of Du Fu's awareness of crisis: his profound worry for country and people in cross-cultural communication. |
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