A Comparative Study Of Stephen Owen's And Xu Yuanchong's English Representations Of Conceptual Metaphors In Tang-and-Song Poetry From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Conceptual metaphor,as a vital term in cognitive linguistics,allows us to understand a unfamiliar or abstract concept by virtue of a familiar and concrete concept.Chinese classical poetry is a precious treasure of the Chinese literature,by taking advantage of beautiful language,distinctiveness in rhythm.Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in Chinese classical poetry.It can be any figurative expression,including a single imagery,the juxtaposition of images and metaphorical structures,or even the poetry itself.In terms of conceptual metaphor research,it has always been confined in the comparison in the rhetoric scope from traditional translation theories,overlooking the cognitive feature of metaphor.Recently,with the in-depth of metaphor researches and cross-disciplinary combination,the research of conceptual metaphor translation has stepped into a new stage along with the cognitive view of metaphor research changing.As one of the important metaphor proposition model theories in cognitive linguistics,Conceptual Integration theory,put forward by Fauconnier is used for human to interpret metaphor by virtue of cognitive constructing.And this theory has attracted great attention of the scholars at home and abroad.The network model of conceptual integration consists of four spaces and all of the mental spaces connect with each other through cross-domain projections and finally generate a new emergent structure in the blended space through composition,elaboration and optimization.At present,many great results have been made in the translation of poetical conceptual metaphor,but the researches mostly focus on the translation skills,while the empirical researches of conceptual metaphor translation in Chinese classical poetry are rare from the perspective of Conceptual Integration theory.Xu Yuanchong,as one of our Chinese well-known translators,has devoted his whole life to the translation of Chinese classical literature,making great achievements in the classical poetical translation.He put forward his own translation theories,including the theory of three beauties,creativity theory and cultural theory when translating Chinese classical poetry.As one of the most prestigious professors in Harvard,Stephen Owen mainly focuses on the studies of Chinese classical poems and has made great results in Chinese classical poetical translation.He tries his best to retain Chinese style of poetry by virtue of foreignization strategy,making the English readers fee] the differences of two languages and literature.Both of the two English translations have won great praise with high reference value.In this paper,two parallel corpora,namely XYCPARA and OWENPRARA will be built with the versions of Xu Yuanchong and Stephen Owen in Tang-and-Song poetry.The auxiliary software of ABBYYAligner is used for alignment and Antconc software and Paraconc software are helpful for us to clearly discover differences of the two English versions at the levels of language features,style and text.Then,the author will expound the cognitive mechanism of thinking transformation in translation of poetical conceptual metaphor,and probe its causes under the optimization principles and integrated network models of conceptual integration theory,so as to enlarge our researching aspects of poetical conceptual metaphor translation.After the analysis of metaphor cases in self-built corpus,the results are shown as follows:1)Conceptual metaphors in the Chinese classical poetry can be classified into three types,namely imagery metaphor,basic metaphor and ideorealm metaphor.In Owen's translation,the explicitness feature is more apparent but Xu's translation is more accurate and brief in language expressions.At the level of style,Xu Yuanchong pays attention to three beauties:beauty in sound,form and artistic conception,while Owen tends to use prose style frequently in poetic conceptual metaphor translation.At the discourse level,Xu Yuanchong insists in domestication method while Owen prefers to foreignization method in translating conceptual metaphors.2)It is found that Xu's translation is more faithful,expressive and elegant,letting the readers truly know of the fascinations of Chinese classical poetry and its culture while Stephen Owen's version might be more comprehensible and accepted by the Western readers,through restoring the image schema of the source text,but is poor in logic and the best relevance of the conceptual meanings and pragmatic intents in translation of conceptual metaphor.The thesis tries to tell us that there are the fundamental reasons of psychological cognitive similarities,diverse cognitive structures and comprehension of cognitive context in the two languages,causing equivalence or untranslatability in poetic conceptual metaphor translation.Conceptual integration theory can better explain the issue of translatability and untranslatability in poetic conceptual metaphor translation.I hope that the findings in this thesis will be conducive in further explorative studies of cross-cultural translation and translation of conceptual metaphors in Chinese classical poetry.