A Sociosemiotic Study Of The Meaning Transfer In The C-E Translation Of The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem is the masterpiece of the Chinese contemporary science fiction writer Liu Cixin,which also serves as a milestone in the history of Chinese science fiction creation.Ever since its publication,the novel has swept the board with various domestic awards.It's not until the Chinese-American writer Ken Liu translated the novel into English that The Three-Body Problem attracted a world-wide attention and won the 73 rd Hugo Award for Best Novel.The success of the translation has also attracted the attention of more and more translators and scholars.The translation of The Three-Body Problems has far-reaching significance for the development of Chinese science fiction,and it deserves careful and in-depth research.Sociosemiotics is an interdiscipline based on sociology,semiotics and linguistics.Translation theory from the sociosemiotic perspective points out that the nature of translation is cross-linguistic,cross-social and cross-cultural intersemiotic transmission,emphasizing the nature of language as signs while paying attention to the non-linguistic factors that affect the process of translation,including context,culture,register and so on.From the sociosemiotic point of view,translation is the process of encoding and decoding signs in different social and cultural contexts,which is also the reproduction of the meanings of source language as signs in the target language.Here the meanings refer to referential meaning,linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning.This thesis takes Ken Liu's English translation of The Three-Body Problem as the research object,and adopts the sociosemiotic approach to translation study.Based on the sociosemiotic translation criterion proposed by Professor Chen Hongwei--“correspondence in meaning”,it is intended to make a comparative analysis of the typical examples in original Chinese novel and the English translation,in order to reveal the reproduction and loss of meanings of language signs in the process of translation under the translation criterion “correspondence in meaning”,focusing on analyzing and discussing the transfer of meanings as well as translator's corresponding translation strategies and methods,probing into the important role meaning transfer plays in the success of the translation of The Three-Body Problem in the light of sociosemiotics,thus providing reference for the translation of such Chinese science fictions.In general,the sociosemiotic approach to translation points out the nature of language as signs,emphasizing the transfer of the meanings of the original language in the process of translation,which provides a relatively comprehensive new perspective for translation studies.This thesis adopts sociosemiotic approach to translation to analyze Ken Liu's English translation of The Three-Body Problem,which makes up for the lack of research on Chinese science fictions in this field,providing reference for the translation and translation study of contemporary Chinese literary works.