A Cognitive Analysis Of Mistranslations In The English Versions Of Sun Tzu's The Art Of War

Sun Tzu's The Art of War, a 2500-year old Chinese military masterpiece that has drawn much attention at home and abroad, has created an influence transcending its military value. The practical application study of it is so extensive and intensive as to form a contrast to the regrettable shortage of its translation studies. With such a shortage, it may not be surprising that mistranslations exist more or less in almost all the versions of it, among which foreign translators' translations are generally more serious. The intention and significance of this thesis lies in upgrading its translation and promoting Chinese culture. In particular, it aims to detect the cognitive cause of the mistranslated points of 5 English versions of Sun Tzu's The Art of War from the perspective of cognitive prototype, through comparison and analysis of the translation of some lexical items, especially polysemes.The notion of prototype, closely related to category, gained further advance with the rise and development of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics. According to the discovery of cognitive science, categorization is an essential ability of human beings in perceiving and cognizing the objective world. Virtually it is the process of classification in which the central member or members are taken to be the prototypes.A wide use of polysemy is one of the prominent features of Sun Tzu's The Art of War which makes it really difficult to decode accurately and translate properly. The author points out that it would become impossible for the task of translating to proceed smoothly without translators' accurate cognition to the source text, in which word categorization plays a key role. The outcome of translating relies much on translators' choice from the meaning category of each polyseme. And the tendency of translators' improper meaning choosing could be analyzed and detected through the comparison with the central member -prototype. After the deliberate comparison and analysis of the 5 English versions of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and the application of cognitive prototype theory, the thesis brings forward 3 types of cognitive causes resulting in mistranslations: namely substitution of the prototype between different categories, confusion of the prototype and marginal concepts in the same category, concept shifts among the prototype of the basic-level category, super-ordinate category and subordinate category.