A Study On Construal Operation In The English Version Of Mo Yan’s Honggaoliang Jiazu

Cognition is a way for subjects to perceive and conceptualize the world and the experiences acquired in this process.Cognitive Linguistics strives to seek the universal rules behind languages from the perspective of our cognitive abilities and lays emphasis on the study of the relationship between languages and thought.The basic cognitive model advocated by Cognitive Linguistics is:reality-cognition-language.From the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics,translation is one kind of cognitive activity based on multiple interactions of the cognitive subjects with the background of their own real experiences,including the author,the translator and the target readers.Authors choose various expressions to convey their intended meanings or thoughts based on their cognitive experiences,and then translators are expected to completely understand the meanings and implications of the source language and to translate them into the target language with devotion to reflecting the real world and the cognitive world depicted by the author,and in the meanwhile,translators have to take the cognitive models of the target readers and the readability into consideration.In 1987,Cognitive linguist Langacker proposed the construal theory and its operational dimensions,and he modified them and finally fixed on the four concepts:scope,perspective,prominence and specificity.His construal theory and the four operational dimensions provide theoretical basis and operational dimensions to study the subjective construals made by translators in literary translation and serve well to probe into the subjectivity of translators in translation process.Honggaoliang Jiazu,a typical masterpiece of Mo Yan,the Nobel laureate in Literature in 2012,was translated into English in 1993 by sinologist Howard Goldblatt.He lays emphasis on creative translation on the premise of being faithful to the original work in translation to fit in with the cognitive models and reading habits of target readers.This thesis analyses the English version of Honggaoliang Jiazu on the ground of Langacker’s construal theory and its operational dimensions.It is found that,in terms of scope,perspective,prominence and specificity,the translator has carried out subjective construal operations based on his own embodied experience and cognitive model and adopted different translation strategies,which helps to reveal the subjectivity of translators in literary translation.It consists of three major parts:introduction,main body and conclusion.The first part will introduce the study background,purpose and significance of the thesis and its organization.The main body consists of three chapters.The first chapter is literature review,the second is the theoretical framework of the thesis-Langacker’s construal theory and its four operational dimensions,and the third chapter is a case study to illustrate the construal operation in Howard Goldblatt’s English version of Honggaoliang Jiazu and to reveal the subjectivity of the translators in the process of translation.The last part is the conclusion of the thesis,including the findings and limitations of the thesis and suggestions for further study.