Dialect Translation In Mo Yan's Works From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

With the background of his hometown,Shandong Gaomi,Mo Yan creates his works by using a many of dialects,and thus his works are full of specific language features of Gaomi.However,there is no enough study on dialect translation in the translation field.As a result,the thesis attempts to study the dialect translation in Mo Yan's novels from the perspective of Construal theory for the purpose of verifying the guidance of Construal theory to dialect translation.Construal theory is an important concept in cognitive linguistics.Langacker believes that language has the feature of initiative which can be expounded by Construal theory.Construal theory refers to the ability that people adopt various methods to understand the same scene,including five dimensions,that is,specificity,prominence,perspective,scope and background.Translation is also a cognitive activity,and thus the translator can have different construal ways for the same source language text.Moreover,owing to the existence of cultural difference,the construal way between the original and the translator is also different,which can be explained by the dimensions of Construal theory.With Construal theory as the theoretical foundation and the dialects in Mo Yan's three novels as research materials,the thesis makes a qualitative analysis on the dialect translations in Mo Yan's novels(i.e.geographical dialect,temporal dialect and social dialect)respectively from the dimensions of Construal theory.It is found that Construal theory has an inner cognitive interpretation for the dialect translation.These three dialects have their own translation processes from the perspectives of construal dimensions.In light of scope and background,temporal dialect has the time features,which needs encyclopedic knowledge during the translation process,and basic domain,domain and immediate scope should be activated for the translation of temporal dialect.According to specificity,the higher or lower level of specificity should be applied based on various purposes for the translation of geographical dialect.Based on prominence dimension,the features of social dialect need the prominent figure to show in the translation process.All in all,Construal theory has the guidance function on the dialect translation.