Study Of Translator's Subjectivity Based On The Cognitive Perspective System

In the process of literary translation,the translator's subjectivity can be embodied in their translation.But in the history of translation study,the subjectivity of translator has long been ignored or restrained for the traditional translation theories focus on the original text and author,emphasizing equivalence between original text and target text,translator's faithfulness and loyalty to the original author.In 1960 s,deconstruction theory thrived and was introduced into translation,since then the translator's subjectivity has attracted great attention.But the deconstruction theory exaggerated the subjectivity of the translator,ignoring the objective factors of translator.After cognitive linguistics was applied into translation studies,research on translator's subjectivity began to get a new development.Cognitive linguistics is a newly rising and interdisciplinary subject,which researches on people's cognitive ability represented in language expression and explores their cognitive patterns hidden in language through embodiment and experience.Cognitive linguistics holds that cognition is the intermediate link connecting the world and language.So language is not exactly the mirror reflection of the objective world.It involves the participation of human being's cognition.In other words,language comes from the interaction between objective world and human being's cognition,thus use of language inevitably embodies human's subjectivity.Actually,translation is a process of cognition in which the translator transforms the original language into target language.For different translators do not choose the same cognitive way toward the same original scene,translator's subjectivity will definitely be reflected in the target language.Perspective refers to people's observation angles which can directly affect the comprehension of the original text and the linguistic expressions of the target text.That is to say,perspective is able to show people's cognitive ability to construe things,and it explores the cognitive phenomenon and cognitive rules through the study of language expression and structure.Thus a comparative study of translation versions from the perspective of language can explicitly manifest the translator's subjectivity.Under the perspective of cognitive semantics,Talmy,founder of cognitive linguistics,holds the view that language is composed of two subsystems: grammar and lexicon.The grammatical elements of a sentence determine the majority of the structure of the cognitive representation,while the lexical elements determine the majority of its content.The grammatical elements have yielded a set of notions which are helpful for discovering common semantic properties.Those grammatically specified notions can be seen to pattern in certain conceptual categories termed as schematic systems.Talmy mainly introduces five schematic systems namely configurational structure,perspective,distribution of attention,force dynamics and cognitive state,among which perspective system is divided into four aspects: perspectival location,perspectival distance,perspectival mode and direction of viewing and it is closely related to linguistic expressions.Therefore this thesis attempts to apply perspective system into the translation research to study the translator's subjectivity.To do the research,this thesis aims at answering the following three questions: 1)Is it feasible to adopt cognitive perspective system to analyze translator's subjectivity in the process of translation? 2)What aspects represent the translator's subjectivity in the translated versions due to the application of subjective perspective? 3)What translation enlightenment can be drawn under the guide of cognitive perspective system?In China,language materials used to research on translator's subjectivity mainly focus on Chinese ancient poetry.And recently some scholars have begun to study classical Chinese books,dramas and novels but they only selected one translation version lacking of accuracy.Few people turn their attention to classical prose,but in fact,prose has free forms,abundant content and deep thoughts which should be feasible as the language material to analyze the translator's subjectivity.Moreover,to make the findings more accurate,the author selects at least two translation versions of each prose translated by famous translators both at home and abroad.The author will comparatively analyze different versions of Chinese classical short prose and their original texts from the Talmy's four aspects of perspective system.Through the studies,this thesis has got the following findings: 1)Adopting cognitive perspective system to analyze translator's subjectivity is feasible.It is found that perspective system can objectively reflect the essence of translator's subjectivity avoiding excessive subjectivity.2)By comparing different translated versions of the same original text,the language expressions and language structures which represent the translator's subjectivity are reflected in the following four aspects.Firstly,by analyzing the location of perspective point,the translator's subjectivity is represented by adding and shifting personal deixis and selecting different directional verbs,in which personal deixis is the most important element to locate the viewpoint and show the divergent process of cognition.Secondly,by analyzing perspectival distance,it is discovered that spatial deixis,omission of the proximal description and changing in extension can represent translator's subjectivity,among which spatial deixis is the most common and basic way,while omission and extension is much more rare.Thirdly,by analyzing two perspectival mode---sequential mode and synoptic mode,it can be seen that shifting these two perspective modes shows more subjectivity than keeping the same perspective mode.Besides,in some way,this kind of shifting is inevitable in translation processing.Fourthly,by analyzing the direction of viewing,it is clear that keeping the same consequential or antisequential perspectival mode embodies low degree of subjectivity,while shifting between them represents high degree of subjectivity.3)When doing practical translation,on the one hand,translators should try their best to be faithful and loyal to the original author's cognitive perspective;on the other hand,translators should accept the existence of subjectivity and admit that in some cases,shifting perspective is inevitable and can better reflect the author's true thoughts.This thesis has verified the feasibility of analyzing the translator's subjectivity from the perspective system.Besides,using Talmy's perspective system to study the translator's subjectivity provides a new way to study classical prose.