A Study On The English Translation Of Yu Dafu's Autumn In Peiping

Autumn in Peiping is a famous prose in the modern history. Great colorfulness and rhythm lie in this prose which is full of concentrated emotion with elegant diction and fresh and unostentatious language. This essay embodies without concealing the agonizing mood of a talented intellectual resided in a turbulent society and shows the readers a feeling and setting happily blended scene which is melancholy but pretty and meaningful. In order to bring forth this excellent work which has vivid sense of time to the people all over the world, many translators exert great efforts and try to demonstrate the earnest love of the author to the autumn in the old capital to the maximum extent on the aspects of language and artistic conception. However, the different features of languages and differences of culture virtually add the difficulties of translation. Therefore, the analysis and guidance of the translation of prose from the perspective of cognitive linguistics become a new trend.Recently, cognitive linguistics develops vigorously and gradually shows its special attractiveness. It is a linguistics which emerged in America and Europe in 1970s and developed a lot in 1980s. Then it was gradually accepted, adopted and applied by the scholars all around the world. Though it is still in the state of development and has not formed an integral system of theory, it opens up a fresh perspective in many different fields undeniably.The research and exploration of these scholars have set down firm basis for carrying out the studies and researches of translation under the perspective of cognitive linguistics. This thesis takes a brand-new angle of cognitive linguistics----dynamic attention and mental scanning to make the primary probe of the study of prose translation. In order to make it more concrete, the author choose the famous writer Yu Dafu's prose---- Autumn in Peiping as the prototype of this study and carry out comparative analysis of its three translation versions. Thus, the directive function and feasibility of these two theories on translation studies can be found through the perspective of cognition.Although the cognitive activity is very complicated and cannot be explained with one or two theories, the author found that, through the analysis of the translation versions, these two cognitive theories can give relevant directions and guidance for translation activities. Also, the two theories have considerable explanation power to the construal of the translators and the reproduction of the images and scenes of the original text in their own translations.