A Study On The Translation Of Cultural Imagery From The Perspective Of Cultural Linguistics

The Secret History of the Mongols is a classical work of historic and cultural value, which records the origin, development and expansion of the Mongolian ethnicity. The content of it includes such broad topics as Mongolian military affairs,ideology, culture and literature that it undoubtedly possesses great research value.English translations of The Secret History of the Mongols came into existence in the1950 s. So far there exist four complete versions, but it is a shame that few scholars in China have noticed and carried out translation studies(English) of this classical literature. In recent years even though an academic group led by Wang Hongyin and a few Master and Ph D. candidates have started conducting translation researches, the result is still so insufficient compared with the translation studies of other famous classical works. To fill the gaps, this thesis, using Palmer’s cultural linguistics as the theoretical framework, undertakes a translation study of The Secret History of the Mongols.Cultural linguistics, proposed by Gary B. Palmer in 1996, advocates to study the relations between language and culture from a cognitive perspective, namely imagery.Therefore, taking imagery as the intermediary concept, the thesis carries out a comparative analysis of The Secret History of the Mongols and its two translated versions by Urgunge Onon and Francis Woodman Cleaves. Imagery is a broad concept existing in diverse forms, so relating it with the features of translation study,the author chooses to conduct a comparative analysis along the following four imagery types: simple imagery(image), complex imagery, phonological imagery and metaphor(conceived as one kind of imagery in cultural linguistics). Through the translation study of imagery, the thesis intends to find out: 1) when reconstructing the original imagery in the target language, what kinds of transformations or shifts occur,and what are the factors that lead to the changes? 2) when rebuilding the same source text imagery in the target language, are there differences between Onon’s translation and Cleaves’ translation?Research results show that when cultural imagery in The Secret History of the Mongols is translated into English, English expressions appear to be lengthy on onehand, and that on the other the reconstructed imagery is incomplete, inaccurate, and different in focus of attention compared with the original imagery. These changes result from the differences between the two different language systems and the difference between the translators’ individual cognition. Moreover, through the comparison between the two translations, the author finds out that when presenting the same original imagery, they differ in both language usage and different dimensions of mental imagery. However, since no regularity is observed from these differences, the thesis fails to conclude which version has better retained the source text imagery...