On The Translation Of Chinese Idioms With Numerals: A Conceptual Integration Theory Approach

Numerals are the crystal of human's wisdom, the measurement of science and social development, and idioms in Chinese are the refined usages of the Chinese language. Chinese idioms with numerals are the combination and deposition of the Chinese language, people's beliefs, religions, and experience, etc.As is known, communication depends on language, and communication also enhances the generation, existence and development of language. Translation is a significant communicative means by which people fulfill the switch of languages. With the development of cross-cultural communication, the significance of translation outstands. Chinese idioms have long been regarded as the main obstacle during translation because of their unique properties. So far, few scholars have systematically studied idiom translation.From the semantic perspective, the essence of translation is to research how the meaning or information is transferred from one context to another. Theories on "translation as metaphor", "equivalence" and "untranslatibility" all consider meaning as an object projected from the source text to the target text, and try to find the totally same linguistic descriptions in different cultural backgrounds. These theories all neglect the translators' subjectivity and thus can not be fulfilled in reality. With the development of cognitive science, especially after the proposal of the Conceptual Integration Theory by Fauconnier& Turner (1994, 1998), the translator's subjectivity attracts more attention, and translation is gradually regarded by some as a dynamic process in which four spaces (two inputs, generic space and blend space) interact with each other. Its optimality principles make the elements projected from the inputs reconstructed dynamically and generate the new projecting relations which have never appeared in the original inputs, thus making the emergent structure dynamically operate. This thesis will use the Conceptual Integration Theory to research the cognitive process of translation of numeral idioms in order to provide certain reference for idiom translation from the theoretical perspective.The author considers the cognitive process of the translation of Chinese numeral idioms as an integrating process of four spaces, i.e. the source text space which is constituted by the entrenched or conventionalized numeral idioms integrated by the source grammar and people's conceptual structure of the outer world; the translator space which is integrated by the translator's language competence, pragmatic consideration, personal preference and cognitive context which are internalized in the translator's cognition; the generic space which is an abstract structure composed by similar elements of the two inputs and maps onto both inputs throughout the whole process of translation, thus guarantees the cross-space mappings and projections; and finally the blended space in which the emergent structure (which can be used in turn as one of the inputs in the overall integration in transition, thus completing and elaborating the existing text) is generated. The translation of Chinese idioms with numerals is a process of re-creation of the entrenched ones used in the new situation rather than a mere reproduction.This thesis also introduces the conventionalized meaning of numerals and grammatical functions of numeral idioms in order to provide clear conceptual structure of numerals during the integration in translation.We hope this thesis may provide some enlightenment on the application of Conceptual Integration Theory in more detailed linguistic elements.