A Study On The English Translation Of Government Work Report From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

As China plays an increasingly important role on the international stage,"the voice of China" has attracted a widespread attention of foreign people.The Government Work Report(GWR)is a window for the foreign people to understand China objectively and truly.The Report fully reflects China's national conditions so there are a lot of vocabularies and expressions with Chinese characteristics,which will result in the obstacles for translation.The studies on the English translation of the GWR have aroused great interest of domestic scholars and English learners.By employing the Equivalent Theory,the Functional Skopos Theory,the Relevance Theory and the Eco-translation Theory,they give the examples cited from the Report and analyze them based on the theoretical requirements,and then illustrate what strategies should be used.While in this thesis,the author employs the four basic network models of the Conceptual Integration Theory(CIT)converting the study from the results centered to the process concerned.The development of cognitive linguistics has laid a foundation for the emergence of the CIT,which is also called the Blending Theory.The theory is put forward by American linguist Fauconnier,and it is improved gradually by him and his colleagues.On the basis of the theoretical model of the four mental spaces,Fauconnier and Turner propose four basic network models of the CIT.Those models provide the theoretical frameworks for the exploring of cognitive process in translation,and they make the abstract cognitive process tangible.And some of the domestic scholars make the theoretical application that combines the CIT with translation process,which provides further guidance to the thesis.On the basis of the linguistic characteristics of the GWR,the author makes use of qualitative method and employs the network models of the CIT to analyze the cognitive process behind the translation of vocabularies,sentences and text.According to the previous analysis,the author summarizes which network model of the CIT should be used to analyze a certain kind of language phenomenon and what translation strategy should be adopted to achieve the cognitive equivalence between the source language readers and the target language readers.This thesis can be divided into five parts.The first chapter is the introduction,which introduces the background and significance of the study,expounds the research methods and research questions,and gives a general outline of the thesis.The second chapter is the literature review.First,the author summarizes the research status of the CIT and the studies of its applications both at home and abroad.And then the author gives a brief introduction to the previous studies on the GWR translation and points out the deficiencies of their studies.Based on that,the author finds the key point to her own study.The third chapter is the theoretical framework of the thesis.It is the introduction to the CIT,including the definition of basic terms,the basic framework of conceptual integration and its operation,Optimality Principles and four basic network models of it.Chapter four is the main body containing two sub-parts:In the first part,the author on the basis of the language phenomena which can lead to the obstacles in translation summarizes the linguistic characteristics of the GWR from the following five aspects: the usage of the words,sentence patterns,rhetorical devices,the organization of the text and its style.At the lexical level,four-character words,culture-loaded words(the words with the characteristics of the times,the words reflecting the national conditions,and the words with cultural inheritance)and abbreviations are often used;at the syntactic level,unlike English,long sentences and null subject sentences are often employed;at the textual level,the GWR has the fixed organization structure and lacks connectives and corresponding references.Those characteristics shown in the words,sentence patterns and the organization of the text bring barriers to translation.In the second part,the language features of the GWR mentioned above are classified according to the translation strategies used in translation.And then the author makes use of the network models to analyze why the corresponding translation strategies should be used.It aims to enlighten the translator as how to operate the cognitive system when dealing with the same kind of language phenomenon.Then according to the analysis,the author adopts appropriate translation strategies to achieve the cognitive equivalence between the source text readers and the target text readers.At the lexical level,when dealing with the words or phrases having the same referential meanings and connotative meanings,that is in the mirror network,literal translation can be adopted;though input spaces,generic space,and blended space share the same expression frame,which is also in the mirror network,the translator has to make appropriate addition to achieve the cognitive equivalence between the source text readers and the target text readers because the target readers lack the corresponding cultural background.Four-character words have no corresponding expression frame in the target language,culture-loaded words do not have the same connotative meanings,and the abbreviations lack related social background information,so the expression frame in the target text space is projected to the blended space,while the expression frame in the source text space is abandoned.That is in the single-scope network.In this situation,explanatory is adopted.Sometimes in Chinese,in order to pursue the harmony of phonology and symmetry in structure,there may be semantic repetition in the words composing the four-character words.However,repetition should be avoided in English.That process complies with single-scope network for the expression frame from target text space is used.In this case,simplification should be employed.In the GWR,there are vocabularies separated by comas.Without thinking carefully,they are easily regarded as in coordinated relation.It also accords with single-scope network,in which combination should be adopted to make the logical relation explicit between them.At the syntactic level,unlike English,null subject sentences and long sentences are often used in the GWR.In order to make the translation tally with the target text readers' thinking mode,the expression frame from the target text space should be used.This process coincides with single-scope network.When dealing with the null subject sentences,noun subjects and pronominal subjects are added.And when the doer of a sentence is not emphasized or it is explicit,active voice can be changed into passive voice.When dealing with long sentences,they can be divided into several pieces according to sense groups.Thus division is used.What's more,word order should also be adjusted in order to meet the target readers' expression habit.At the textual level,the organization pattern of the target language should be adopted.Thus it is a single-scope network.On this occasion,the addition of references and connectives can be used to make the implicit logical relation in the text explicit,and make the text hypotaxis.Chapter five is the conclusion.In this part,the author summarizes the major findings,the deficiencies of the study and provides the suggestions for the future studies.