A Study Of Translation Of Saying Verbs As In Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone From The Perspective Of Frame Semantics

Since the first book of Harry Potter series—Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has been released in 1997, Harry Potter series have aroused a Harry Potter mania. The series have also achieved great success in China. Many Chinese readers are attracted by the plot, characters, and language of the wonderful translation version. Because of the popularity of Harry Potter series throughout the world, people have begun to do some research work on the novel; but compared with the commercial success, the series of Harry Potter still lack systematic researches in the academic area. Though some work has been done on its literary significance of its original, little research work has been done on its Chinese version.The most outstanding characteristic of Harry Potter series is the richness of its language. There are a great number of dialogue scenes in the novel, and saying verbs become an essential part. The author J. K. Rowling uses a lot of saying verbs to express different ways of speaking, different volume of sound, different pitches and so on to make the reader experience the richness of the language. But in the Chinese translation version, such kind of richness can not be realized.In the original work, there are many saying verbs to indicate specific ways of speaking. For instance, when referring to someone speaks in a loud voice, Rowling uses snarl, roar, snap, bark, yell, boom, bellow, and so on. As referring to someone speaks in a low voice, Rowling uses mutter, grunt, murmur, whisper and so on. However, in the translation version, so many specific ways of speaking cannot be expressed perfectly. The translator simply uses a relatively abstract word to express all these hyponyms. For example, snarl, roar, snap, bark, yell, boom, bellow and so on are all translated into"吼"in Chinese.In this thesis, the author tries to study on the translation of saying verbs in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in light of frame semantics. Frame semantics is used to understand words and grammar structures. According to frame semantics, all the knowledge which is directly or indirectly related to a certain linguistic unit form a unique knowledge structure together. And the knowledge structure is frame. Frame serves as a kind of cognitive structuring that provides the background knowledge and motivation for the existence of words in a language as well as how they are used in discourse. According to frame semantics, the description of word meaning must be linked with frames. That is to say, in order to describe a word, one should put it under relevant frame. First, the author will analyze the semantic similarities and differences of these saying verbs according to frame semantics. Second, the concept of core frame element derived from FrameNet is introduced to this thesis and it functions as a key parameter of distinguishing the acceptable translation from unacceptable ones.The study of this thesis finds that using frame semantics can distinguish saying verb synonyms clearly and FrameNet can provide the translations of saying verbs with very important parameter, that is, the core frame elements. It can also provide the translations of saying verbs with different thinking patterns. Accordingly it will be heuristic in dealing with the similar translation problems in the future.