On Translation Of Poetic Images From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Up to now,the study of the poetry translation mostly interprets the translator's strategies and styles of translation from the perspective of semantics,rhythm,and imagery.However,few people study the cognitive mechanism behind these translations.Based on the theory of conceptual integration,this paper takes the English translation of Guo Feng in Book of Songs as an example to discuss the conceptual integration process of image translation in cross-domain mapping and analyze translation methods adopted by different translators.This paper divides the images in Guo Feng in Book of Songs into two parts: images of partial equivalence and non-equivalent images.The images in Book of Songs contain unique symbolic meaning.Although the material carrier of some images can be found in the target culture,their cultural connotation or symbolic meaning is unique to the source language,and this kind of image is partially equivalent image;Other images not only have its unique cultural connotation or symbolic meaning,but it is impossible to find their corresponding material carrier in the target culture,and this kind of image is non-equivalent image.Besides,the conceptual integration of translation involves two steps: first,decompression.Because the process of the original author's creation is the compression of concepts,frameworks and their relations,the translator should first decompress them.Secondly,translators should reproduce and integrate these concepts and their relations.Based on this principle,this paper also explores how the translator reproduces the compressed relations in their translation of image groups.Through the analysis,it is found that there are three situations in which the translators translate images.Firstly,the literal translation method or transliteration is used to retain the image carrier;secondly,not only the image carrier is retained,but the connotation of the image is compensated by means of liberal translation.Thirdly,the method of literal translation plus liberal translation is used to retain the image,and explain the cultural function of the image.In addition,when translating image groups,translators deal with the relation between images in different ways,thus interpreting different themes of poetry,which indirectly reflects the translator's pre-understanding,that is,the translator's cultural background,translation principles have an impact on the selection of their translation methods.