Quality Assessment Of Image Reconstruction In Three English Versions Of Mao Zedong's Poetry: A Conceptual Integration Approach

"Image" is a crucial element to the making of a poem, in particular to that of a classical Chinese poem. The essential meaning of a poem cannot be fully understood until the use of images in that poem is thoroughly comprehended. Mao Zedong's poetry is a typical example in that the use of images occupies a central place in his poetry composition, and the images employed has constituted the distinctive personality of his poetry. Therefore, in Chinese-English poetry translation, such as the translation of Mao's poetry, great importance should be, accordingly, attached to "image reconstruction", for the quality of reconstructed images in the target text will substantially affect the overall translation quality of the poem concerned. Consequently, our primary concern is how to evaluate the quality of image reconstruction through a theoretical-grounded approach.However, although the existing research exploring poetry translation and image reconstruction is extensive in amount, much of it has focused on either strategies adopted to solve encountered problems, or subjective evaluations of different translations of a single verse without any theoretical framework. In other words, arbitrary prescriptive guidelines and empirical conclusions account for most research conducted, and previous studies on the English translation of Mao Zedong's poetry are no exception to this trend, hence the motivation for this study.This thesis is an attempt to address the translation quality assessment (TQA) of image reconstruction as represented in three English versions of Mao's poetry, by adopting Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Integration theory as the framework. The theory holds that "blending", a process involving network interactions and mappings across different mental spaces, is ubiquitous in any novel or entrenched meaning construction, and in our study, we prove that this "blending" process also accounts for the backstage cognition of the creation, interpretation and reconstruction of images, and in the light of this finding, we are able to devise an approach for quality assessment of image reconstruction, including the parameters in concern, the defining of defects, and the specification of the standards accordingly.In this study, the devised approach has been applied to assessing the quality of reconstructed images in three English versions of Mao's poetry, and has been proved feasible in practice. This initial accomplishment in application is expected to be of certain value for future research focusing on the elaboration of a more comprehensive TQA model. Moreover, the TQA approach provides not only a product standard for evaluation of image reconstruction but also a set of guiding parameters for the translators who are engaged in the process of image reconstruction.