Image Reproduction In Poetry Translation: An Embodied Cognitive Perspective

The image is an important part to show the charm of poetry and is also the main concern in poetry translation. The beauty of images is hard to be expressed in words and the successful reproduction is mainly dependent on translators'embodied cognition. The existing related researches mainly focus on strategies and effect evaluation of image reproduction, which still stay on the formal level of language study while little attention has been paid on tracing to its source and explanation to factors influencing image reproduction is more or less not convincing.The thesis takes the perspective of embodied cognition from cognitive linguistics and explores main features of the translator's embodied cognition on poetic images with the aim of revealing influence mechanisms for poetic image reproduction by analyzing how the translator's embodied cognition acts on image reproduction and how the images reproduced concretely reflect the translator's embodied cognition in the process of poetic image reproduction. Cognitive linguistics points out that embodied cognition is the way that people perceive the world and form conception, and language research must be associated with people's process of forming conception in order to reveal the essence of language. Translation is not only an activity of language transformation but also an activity of the translator's cognition and thought, and translation studies cannot neglect the translator's embodiment of translation and cognition of translation based on the embodiment. Exploring features of embodied cognition on poetic images helps to reveal features and the nature of poetic image reproduction. Commonness of embodied cognition indicates that language is not totally arbitrary, and similarity of the structure of the objective world and the subjective body of embodiment determines that language understanding shares commonness; Individuality of embodied cognition indicates that language is not just the simple mirror reflection of the objective world though they cannot be independent of it. The diversity in individual image reproduction and the homogeneity in holistic image reproduction are respectively the reflections of individuality and commonness of embodied cognition.The paper points out that the translator's embodied cognition is an important factor that influences poetic image reproduction. The translator's embodied cognition of the individual image is a process of mental visualization while the embodied cognition of the holistic image has the feature of reasoning. During the process of image reproduction, the restriction of the translator'cognitive schema causes individual image reproduction to be diverse and the implications of the source individual image to be enriched, deviant or even lost; meanwhile, the control of commonness of the idealized cognitive model makes the holistic image reproduction homogeneous and different translators reproduce the holistic image by the way of figure/ground separation.