A Cognitive Interpretation Of The Translation Methods Of Narrative Features In The Last Lover

The Last Lover is one of the most famous novels written by Can Xue who is one of the influential avant-garde Chinese female writers.It won the Best Translation Book Award in America in 2015.As one of the typical masterworks in contemporary Chinese literature,the translation of The Last Lover is beneficial to the exportation of modern and contemporary Chinese literature.However,the study on the English translation of Can Xue's works has not yet attracted enough attention.Only two theses have studied on the translation and transmission of Can Xue's works,and no studies on the specific translation methods of her works have been conducted.Therefore,this thesis attempts to explore the translation methods of the narrative features of The Last Lover in its English translation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,in order to enrich the study of the translation of Can Xue's works and provide certain enlightenment for the translation of modern and contemporary Chinese literature.With the rise of cognitive linguistics,translation study is turning to cognitive translation study,which refers to adopting the theories of cognitive linguistics to interpret the translation phenomena and find out law in the translation process.In cognitive view,metaphor translation means a mapping from the concepts in source language to the concepts in target language;image translation involves how to transplant the image schemas of the source text into the image schemas of the target text;and as to textual translation,the optimal relevance principle should be conformed to.Based on this,this thesis intends to rely on the concepts of conceptual metaphor,image schema and optimal relevance to interpret the translation methods of metaphors,images and illogical narration in The Last Lover respectively and to study the feasibility and practical value of these translation methods.This thesis is divided into three chapters.The first chapter,based on the theoretical explanation of conceptual metaphor in the view of cognitive semantics,analyzes how the English translation takes the mapping equivalence translation as the major strategy and mapping deviation translation as the minor strategy to represent the metaphor narrative feature.This chapter concludes that as for the metaphors which are easily understood in English,the translator adopts mapping equivalence translation by reproducing the same source domain in the target language and retaining the source domain with explanation;as for the metaphors which may cause misunderstanding in English readers,the translator adopts mapping deviation translation by replacing the source domain of the source language with standard source domain in the target language or deletes the source domain of the metaphor in order to achieve the same linguistic effect.The second chapter relies on the concept of image schema,also in the view of cognitive semantics,to analyze the translation methods of image narrative feature.As to the visual images which have similar image schemas in both Chinese and English culture,the translator adopts literal translation.And as to the auditory images which have differential image schemas in Chinese and English culture,the method of transliteration with explanation is adopted.These two translation methods well represent the vigor and vividness of the image narrative feature in the source text.The third chapter relies on the optimal relevance principle,in the view of cognitive pragmatics,to analyze the translating methods of illogical narration including somniloquy-like monologues and illogical dialogues.It shows that the translator adopts direct translation to retain all the communicative clues arising from syntactic properties by keeping the form of direct quotation as well as the structure of simple sentence without any addition or supplement of interpretation.In this way,optimal relevance is achieved since similar descriptions and contextual effects can be brought to the target readers.In conclusion,in The Last Lover,the special narrative characteristics consisting of novel metaphors,ugly or vivid images and illogical narration have been well represented in the English translation through different translating methods based on the cognitive interpretation of the source text and the target text.And a balance has been achieved between keeping faithful to the original text and enhancing the readability of the English translation.The interpretation of these translating methods in cognitive view shows that while dealing with the narrative features of Chinese literature works,the translator can adopt translating methods based on the cognitive characteristics represented in Chinese and English language and culture so as to export Chinese literature to other countries effectively.