Translation: Conceptual Integration Process

Theoretical studies of translation are flourishing now, but no academic school can give acceptable solutions to some fundamental problems such as translatability, literal or free translation and equivalence. After a survey of some of those schools' studies, this thesis realizes that the roots of those controversial fundamental problems lie in their different understanding of meaning. Generally, most schools hold that meaning is objective, so translation is possible and the standard of translation should be equivalent. Contrarily, some schools take meaning as totally subjective things, and they get the result that translation is impossible. With the development of cognitive science, cognitive approaches to translation also arise. Cognitive linguists suggest that meaning is influenced by the outside world as well as human being's brain. In that sense, translation is possible and has no need to seek equivalence, for subjectivity of meaning guarantees no absolute equivalence.But there are two cognitive approaches to translation recently: conceptual metaphoric theory and conceptual integration theory. The former one used in explaining translation has the same idea with the tradition translation theories, which says that meaning is objective and translation is a transporting process of meaning. That's an old story. This thesis believes that the Conceptual Integration theory can do a better job in explaining translation. After some survey and research the author of this thesis finds that translation is a conceptual integration process and this thesis is an attempt to generate an integration network of translation. The network involves four mental spaces: input 1 (the source text), input 2 (the translator's space), the generic space (similarities of these two inputs), and the blend (the target text). The integration process consists of two sub-processes: the de-integration of the source context, in which the conceptual structures are drawn out, and the integration of the conceptual structures with translator's grammatical knowledge of the target language. Conceptual structure is the thing that doesn't change in the whole process.In the later part of this thesis, the conceptual integration networks of translation are applied to deal with some common situations of practical translation, and to give an explanation to those old controversies in translation theory. The results show that integration networks of translation is more advanced and completed than the traditional translation theories.