A Study On The English Translation Of Emotional Expressions In Bronze And Sunflower From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

The experience of emotion is an activity that emerges at the level of psychological description.This is related to cognitive development and benefits from the conceptualization of the outside world.Conceptualization resides in cognitive processing,in which the meaning of an expression also lies in how it is construed.Language is the carrier of emotion,and emotional factors are embedded in the dynamic changes of multilingual discourse.The rich emotions in Bronze and Sunflower are revealed in the emotional expressions.After carefully contrasting the Chinese work and its English translation,the author finds that there are some differences in the C-E translation of emotional expressions.This thesis attempts to analyze the translator’s cognitive mechanism in the translation of emotional expressions in Bronze and Sunflower from four dimensions of construal theory(scope and background,specificity,perspective and prominence)and to explore the causes for these differences in emotional transmission between the two languages.It aims to provide some new ideas for the translation of Chinese children’s literature in both practical and theoretical aspects.The main findings of this study are as follows: firstly,there are some differences in emotion in the translation of emotional expressions in Bronze and Sunflower,which is related to the different ways of construal for the same situation between the translator and the author.The differences in scope and background are greatly important reasons for the difference in the transmission of emotion.Secondly,the translator’s cognitive mechanism is limited by her personal experience and mental development and indirectly affected by the cognitive and psychological development of the target readers.She takes into account the cognitive ability and acceptance of the target children readers,and makes corresponding changes in perspective.Thirdly,there are many changes in specificity of emotional expressions between the original and the translated text.There are some addition and omission not only in emotional words but also in expressions used to describe the emotion,which makes the emotion conveyed in the translation stronger and weaker than the original one.The increase of emotional expressions makes it more in line with the cognitive development of the target readers while the omission of some emotional expressions removes some traditional virtues in Chinese culture.Fourthly,in the description and construal of the same scene,the translator differs from the author in the prominence of lexical meaning and syntactic structure.It also brings about the changes in the emotional experience of the participants and accordingly the differences in emotional transmission.