From "Talk Through Iconographs" To " Do Things With Words"

For more than thirty years findings in linguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, comparative literature, cultural studies, etc. have been applied to the study of translation, and striking results have been reported. To promote further development of translation studies, it is necessary to set up a multi-level theoretical framework. Nowadays, linguists and researchers in the field of translation still regard intersemiotic translation as periphery. The reason why the study of intersemiotic translation has attracted not so much attention indicates that it is an underestimated area of considerable complexity and interdisciplinarity. But they ignore that different semiotic systems, especially images or pictures are omnipresent in modern society. And communication in this regard among nations and regions is ubiquitous, with political cartoons or editorial cartoons, which display events taking place at home or abroad through iconographs or pictures, a typical example. Republished political cartoons, which is the visual epitome of an incident or event, regional or international, and some of which present striking pictorial comment on politics, is a typical representation of cross-cultural iconographical translation. The large amount of cultural information, such as political, economic, religious and so on, lying behind political cartoons, make the translation practice of them more complex and complicated than absolute text translation.Through the research on the political cartoons republished by domestic media, this thesis is to set up the theoretical framework of political cartoon translation, i.e. establish the definition , types and steps of political cartoon translation. Political cartoon translation is a kind of intercultural iconographical translation, the purpose of which is to help readers of the target language understand the communicative intention of the cartoonist of the source language, usually in the form of caption which includes not only the translation of the title and/or iconotex(and/or caption), but background information of the cartoon, even gives the opinion of the translators as well. Political cartoon translation can be divided into paraphrastic translation, metonymy translation, synecdoche translation and hyperbole translation. The procedure of political cartoon translation includes decoding, analysis, manipulation, transmutation and revise. As information losses is common in translation, especially in political cartoon translation, the thesis also offers solutions to information losses during two steps in practice, i.e. decoding and transformation which information losses is at its highest here. To minimize the losses of information in decoding, translators are imperative to pay more attention to several elements in political cartoons. These elements are iconotext, context, psychology of the cartoonist, at the same time translators must refrain from the influence of anchor effect and isolation effect. As for compensation in transmutation, there are three principles by which translators can abide, i.e. demanding principle, relevant principle and key-information principle.