The Construal Perspective On The English Translation Of Du Fu's“Three Petty Officials”and“three Separations”

Du Fu's “Three Petty Officials” and “Three Separations” are famous realistic poems in Tang poems.There are numerous English translation versions of them.The author of this study focuses on the three English versions translated by Stephen Owen,Rewi Alley and Xu Yuanchong.Cognitive Grammar equals meaning to conceptualization or cognitive processing,and attaches great importance to construal,which is the ability to construe the cognitive domains with different methods.Langacker(2008)pointed out that there are five main dimensions of cognitive construal: scope,background,salience,perspective and specificity,each of them standing for certain cognitive abilities.The author of this study tries to analyze the three English versions in terms of these five dimensions respectively and find out the different ways of construal by different translators.The result of analysis shows:1.On the dimension of scope and background: Stephen Owen faithfully construes the scope of cognitive domains in the original poems.He employs the broader scope and immediate scope to present the scope faithfully.But,sometimes,he doesn't make clear the scope in the original poems.Rewi Alley employs literal translation,zero translation,free translation and transliteration to cover proper scope of cognitive domains.He makes use of free translation but fails to convey the poem in right scope or the whole scope.Furthermore,he doesn't construe the poems in the exact and detailed way in the background domain.Xu Yuanchong,as a Chinese senior translator,knows much more about Chinese culture and background knowledge so that he can present readers more accurate background knowledge and cover the proper scope in relevant cognitive domains.Sometimes,Xu tends to use different scopes from the original poems and fails to cover the proper scope.He doesn't make clear the information and just covers a rough scope of the picture.2.On the dimension of perspective: Stephen Owen employs present tense to conceptualize the poem and adopts more a “subjective” perspective to interpret the six poems.Rewi Alley employs past tense in his translation to construe the original poems.He inclines to employ third person of view and objective perspectives.In some cases,his perspective is different from the original poems.Xu Yuanchong applies the present tense to conceptualize the original poems.He exerts both subjective and objective perspectives to construe these six poems.Sometimes he takes wrong perspective.3.On the dimension of salience: Stephen Owen tends to emphasize the parts that are prominent in the original version and put more emphasis on the future state.Rewi Alley uses free translation and omission to profile the general idea.Sometime he doesn't profile the parts or the whole part that is prominent in the original poems.Xu Yuanchong gives a proper salience to the parts that are salient in the original poems,but sometimes he doesn't profile the most significant aspects.In the process,he focuses on the final state.4.On the dimension of specificity: Stephen Owen tends to construe these six poems in a level of specificity that relatively matches with that in the original poems.Rewi Alley uses the omission in translation and doesn't conceptualize the original poems word by word or the way of the original version.Xu Yuanchong adds more information involved in the content when translating the title.But he often reduces in the level of specificity when construing the content of the original poems.He usually employs free translation to give a general idea of the content.All in all,the three translators have different choices on these five dimensions of construal.Generally speaking,Stephen Owen's faithfully construes Du Fu's “Three Petty Officials” and “Three Separations” in his English translation.Rewi Alley doesn't construe the poems in the same way on some dimensions of construal in the original poems.Xu has the same way of construal in the original poems.But he doesn't conform the original way in some cases.This thesis establishes a trial mode of evaluation for English translations of Du Fu's “Three Petty Officials” and “Three Separations” under the framework of Construal Theory.It is hoped that the analysis will be enlightening to poem translators' cognitive process and translation style analysis and it will provide a new approach to the analysis of ancient poems in general.