A Study On English Translation Of Chinese Pastoral And Landscape Poetries From The Perspective Of Figure-Ground Theory

Cognitive linguistics is the synthesis of linguistics and cognitive science. As a new language study perspective, cognitive linguistics studies the relationship between the universal principle of language and the rules of human cognition. Figure-ground theory is an important notion of cognitive linguistics and it reflects the relationship between language and cognition. It bases on the different cognitive perspective and gives different prominence to the different parts. Figure is the prominent part in cognition and the focus of attention while ground is less prominent than figure and can be considered as the cognitive reference. It originated from Gestalt psychology and was first introduced by Danish psychologist Edger Rubin in1915.Then, this theory was applied by linguists in many domains of language study.Pastoral and landscape poetry plays a very important part in classical Chinese poetries. Chinese and foreign scholars have devoted themselves to the study of translation of Chinese poetries and made many achievements. However, there still has lots of controversy on how to maintain the original beauty of sound, form and meaning. Figure-ground theory provides a new perspective for the study of translation. By awarding the status of figure or ground to the different part of the poem, we can produce a translation with proper target language to convey the artistic conception and give the same prominence to different parts of the poem as in the original version.By employing comparative analysis approach, this thesis applied the figure-ground theory to the analysis of meaning, artistic conception and form of the different translated versions of Chinese pastoral and landscape poetries. The conclusion is that the figure-ground theory can help the translators understand the original version well and then the translators can properly convey the original meaning and artistic conception. The figure-ground theory of cognitive linguistics provides a new method for the translation of Chinese pastoral and landscape poetry.