The Chinese Translation Of Hypallage In Shakespeare’s Drama

The attraction of Shakespeare’s drama mainly profit from his masterly and perfect application of rhetoric. Hypallage, a quite frequent figure of speech in Shakespeare’s drama, is a word originating from Greek "interchange", and its another name is "transferred epithet". Both of them refer to the interchange of two words structure, or transferring the epithet from the appropriate noun to modify another to which it does not really belong to. Some domestic scholars classifies transferred epithet as one category in hypallage, such as Jiang Yue (2000:8-9). However, this thesis attempts to study Shakespeare’s hypallage from a macro perspective.This thesis attempts to make a systematic theoretical supporting and explanation of Shakespeare’s hypallage under the guidance of Conceptual Blending Theory by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. The theory introduces readers the cognitive method between languages and inter language, revelling that translation is one of cognitive activities. Conceptual Blending Theory considers translation is a process of blending and creating two input spaces, source language input and translator input, into a blending version space. Cognitive explanation of translation process is beneficial for better understanding of translation and quality judgement. According to previous research, Shakespeare’s hypallage is divided into five types:hypallge of one adjective and qualified word; two adjectives and qualified words; noun and noun; verb and qualified word; other phrase or sentence structures. The analysis is based on three features of hypallage:transferring human attribute to nonhuman substances; transferring nonhuman substances to nonhuman substances; transferring nonhuman substances to human substances. Wang Lirong (2005) attempts to study hypallage with Conceptual Blending Theory and considers the function of modifier doesn’t give features to modified noun but activates cognitive frame, which has exemplified reasonableness of its application to hypallage. On the basis of the research result, this thesis studies the guidance of the theory to hypallage.The author mainly chooses Shakespeare’s two plays, one comedy and one tragedy, A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and Hamlet and only three language materials from King Lear and Merry Wives of Windsor to support the classification of hypallage. With reference to Chinese versions of Zhu Shenghao and analysis of cognitive process of translation, the author summarizes five translation strategies:literal translation, replace with sentence, replace with phrase, blending translation and separated translation, and comes to the conclusion that hypallage in Shakespeare is not only rhetorical device in written works, but also a cognitive phenomenon, which helps readers get a better understanding of dynamic process of meaning construction. This thesis hopes to further the study of application and guidance of Conceptual Blending Theory to Shakespeare’s hypallge and to promote Shakespeare’s Chinese translation from a perspective of cognitive linguistics.