The Study Of Chinese-english Translation Of Children’s Literary Works From The Perspective Of Iconicity

In the new era of “going-out” of Chinese culture,the promotion and dissemination of outstanding Chinese children’s literature throughout the world should be taken seriously.However,as far as the translation of Chinese literary works is concerned,it’s the adult literature that really goes abroad rather than children’s literature which is still in a peripheral status.This phenomenon results from less attention and concern given by the academia to children’s literature,and more importantly,from the challenge during translating children’s literary works.The main reading body of translated works of children’s literature is the children,while translators who are engaged in the translation of children’s literary works are adults.This inconsistency constitutes the pragmatic challenge for ensuring the quality of the translated works of children’s literature.When it comes to children’s literature translation,the norm that “translators should get close to children’s cognitive level” has always been emphasized.In translation practice,approaching to children’s cognitive level is reflected in that the translated texts do not show no regard of the children’s cognition.Studies on language and cognition indicate that there is similarity between human language and reality,and the essence of translation is the representation of meaning conveyed by source language with target language,which means that the key to dealing with the problem of fitting in with children’s cognitive level in doing children’s literature translation lies in the representation of the similarity between the original text and the reality in the translated text.This study chooses iconicity,one of the most fundamental theories of cognitive linguistics,as the theoretical basis,and mainly with the English translated versions of Chinese children’s literary works as the research object to discuss the principles and strategies of Chinese-English translation of children’s literary works.On the basis of previous research findings in related fields,this thesis explores the implication of iconicity for the Chinese-English translation of children’s literary works.The principle guiding the C-E translation of children’s literary works from the perspective of iconicity put forward in this thesis is that translators should have awareness of iconicity,not only paying attention to the language form of the source text,but more importantly,to the cognitive style that motivates the formation of language form,then use the target language to reproduce the iconicity in original language,thus ensuring that the literariness can be well retained and an equivalent reading experience can be gained between the original children readers and the target children readers.The “children-oriented equivalent translation” will be truly achieved.Besides,the strategies for C-E translation of children’s literary works are: 1)retaining the original language form as far as possible without violating the rules and convention of the target language;2)if the original form can’t be retained,translators should manage to reproduce the cognitive style hidden behind the original form,then choose optimum form to represent this deep motivation for language formation in translated texts.It is another attempt of conducting studies on translation from the perspective of cognition to investigate the principles and strategies of C-E translation of children’s literary works with the combination of iconicity theory,hoping to make some contributions to the “going-out” of Chinese culture,and to pushing the cognitive study of translation forward.