On The Translation Of English Visual Verbs From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Vision is one of basic modes of perception for human beings to observe and understand the external world and acquire perception experience,and as a result,visual verbs occupy an important position in each language.However,they do not receive adequate attention in translation studies,in spite of much semantic and grammatical emphasis from the cognitive perspective in previous researches.This thesis,integrating a corpus-based study and a case study,conducts a systematic contrastive research on the E-C translation of visual verbs,with the aim to describe the choices made by translators,and conclude with some factors influencing the translation.It is found that:(1)Retaining the original type is the dominant translation method for each subcategory of visual verbs;(2)Semantic repetition occupies a large proportion in the Chinese versions compared with the English originals,and the number of semantic repetition in the translations of sensory visual verbs is much higher than that in the mental ones.Besides,the repetitive expressions in the E-C translation of active visual verbs are concerned with the emphasis of the behavior patterns and motivations;(3)English and Chinese differ in the lexicalization pattern.To be specific,the Chinese language,with the lower degree of lexicalization,encodes the meaning of realization by the "visual verb+complement" structure;(4)The translators make choices to adapt to the target language at every level;(5)The Chinese-speaking translators favour more repetitive expressions,reduplicated structures and four-character phrases in their target texts for emphasis under the influence of their thinking modes,aesthetic views and pragmatic principles during the dynamic adaptations;(6)The target language translators can make better choices during the translation for successful communication.The thesis provides valuable reference for the English-Chinese translation study and practice and teaching of visual verbs,and further verifies the influence of the translator's mother tongue on the choices making.In addition,it is also instructive for the relevant translation studies in the research framework.