Interpreting The Translation Of Secenery Depiction In Sheng Si Li Lao Based On Cognitive Construal

The novel Sheng Si Pi Lao sets in Northeast Gaomi Township,a literature realm to which attached Mo Yan's mixed feeling of love and hate.His acute senses and fancy imagination made scenery under his pen exquisite and intense with reality merged into illusion.Goldblatt,the regular translator of Mo Yan's novels,translated this one into Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.In translating scenery depiction,he made addition,omission,deletion,substitution,etc.These translation methods are examined in this thesis from the perspective of cognitive construal.Construal refers to our ability to perceive or interpret the same situation in alternative ways.Dimensions of construal,i.e.aspects of construal,are used to decode ways of construal knitted in linguistic expressions.The widely used construal dimensions earlier are specificity,salience,scoping,and perspective.In the forumlecture“Linguistic Construal and Conceptual Analysis”(2012),Langacker redefined five dimensions of construal.They are selection;prominence;perspective;dynamicity and imagination.This is a more systemic and comprehensive categorization.Based on this renewed version of construal dimensions,this thesis aims at interpreting Goldblatt's translation of scenery depiction in Sheng Si Pi Lao by looking into his construal operations which lead tocorrespondent linguistic expressions and translation methods.Parallel text analysis and case study are carried out for this purpose.It is found that: The translator enjoys construal alternatives under each dimension of construal,among which he shows some preferences.In general,a more explicit translation is preferred.For the dimension of selection,he tends to adopt a higher level of specificity in general.For the dimension of profiling,he is apt to profile both inner relations in a concept and interrelationships between clauses to make things clear.For the dimension of perspective,he prefers a local view than a global one.For the dimension of dynamicity,scanning sequences are often shifted to adapt to the target language convention.For the dimension of imagination,domain transfers and conceptual blending are widely used.These findings may be confined to this case study,yet they echo general tendencies of construal solutions in Chinese-English translation of scenery depiction.