A Study On The English Translation Of Water Images In Song Poetry From The Perspecitve Of Palmer’s Cultural Linguistics

Gary Palmer applies cognitive linguistics directly to three traditional approachesthat are central to linguistic anthropology：Boasian linguistics, Ethnosemantics, and theethnography of speaking, and he names this synthesis cultural linguistics. The mostdistinguished feature of this approach is that it has laid emphasis on image and takes image asone of the key concepts of cultural linguistics. Imagery refers not only to visual images, butalso images we get from all our perceptual organs．It is a complex cognitive item, whichincludes specific images as well as other relevant but more abstract cognitive concepts such asschema and script, etc．Cultural linguistics, by its very essence, is a theory of mental imagery.Therefore, the perfect translation of images becomes a crucial aspect during the process oftranslating. However, because of the different cultures exiting between two differentlanguages, some images have the same meaning, while the others are not. And even themeanings of the same image are also very distinct. Translators should integrate the culture andsome certain mood of a literary work to express the deep meanings of images in translation.Water is the origin of life and the source of everything, which is closely linked withpeople’s life and culture. During the past years, water has always been the darling of theliterati. The poets regard water as the medium of relative, friendship and love. Through water,they expresses their different kinds of moods inside. And all of these are perfectly obvious inSong Poetry. Water is one o f the most important images in the Song poems. Cultural imagesin the classical Chinese poetry translation are the focus of the relevant research in this field.The cultural elements involved in the cultural image of water are one of the cherishingrepresentations of Chinese classical culture, thus calling for its functional translation of boththe cultural and aesthetic elements．From this perspective, the translation of water imageshould be in accordance with the purpose of cultural translation and the aesthetic featureshighlighted in Song poems．This thesis explores the feasibility and the explanatory power of the application ofPalmer’s image theory to the English Translation of water image in Song poems from theperspective of Palmer’s cultural linguistics, which is based on Palmer’s image theory. And onthis basis, some related translation strategies are put forward with the guidance of imagerytheory.