A Comparative Analysis Of The Images Translation In The Poems Of A Dream Of Red Mansions From The Perspective Of Cognitive Grammar

With the development of modern linguistics,many new perspectives have been provided for translation studies.As it is known to all,Cognitive linguistics is a new style and branch of linguistics.Not only it provides a brand new methodology for translation studies,but also explains the translators’ conceptual representation on the level of words and sentence and the cognitive construal operation mechanism in translation practice.In the process of establishing the framework of Cognitive Grammar,construal is a concept called forth by Langacker.He advocates that construal is basic human cognitive ability and the description of language should follow the general cognitive law of human and that interpret the grammatical structure in a cognitive way.According to Langacker(2004),four parameters of construal emerged.Therefore,the thesis will put emphasis on four parameters of construal in Cognitive Grammar to explore different methods of translation.This thesis first focuses on Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar which is similar to cognitive linguistics.To a certain extent,the structure of language is a conceptual structure,so the difference between the conceptual structure and the structure of the language is closely related.In addition to conceptual structure,language expression also contains the way to construe the content and that is image.In other words,image is a special form during the realization of concept.Based on this,the thesis holds that translation practice should be examined on the level of Cognitive Grammar instead of the traditional way of appreciation.In the section of theoretical framework,with the four important parameters,the thesis sums up the four ways to express image including the prominence of one profile of the concept,the change of the specificity to describe the concept,the taking of a different perspective,or select different cognitive domains in the human brain.The four ways are parallel to four parameters,that is to say,prominence,specificity,perspective and selection.Based on this theoretical framework,the thesis makes use of two different translation versions of selected poems in A Dream of Red Mansions as corpus in order to confirm the potential role of four parameters proposed by Langacker in translation practice.The images in the poems of A Dream of Red Mansions are different from those in others,which have the echo of novel content and characters.Therefore,to understand and grasp the selected images is easier than to comprehend abstract concepts.In fact,the application of four parameters of construal is to provide a new methodology for appreciating the different translation versions of the same poem.Combined theoretical discussion with practice examples,this thesis is mainly developed from the following two aspects.One is the categorization and construal of images in chrysanthemum poems and catkin words in A Dream of Red Mansions.Thus,the thesis classifies the use of different images by different characters in the hope of exploring the image-building and fate of characters in the novel.The other one is the contrast of Hawkes’ and Yang’s versions based on image analysis in order to appreciate translation of the images in the two groups of poems from A Dream of Red Mansions.With the elaboration of this thesis,two conclusions have been drawn: From the perspective of image analysis,the selection of images in the poems in A Dream of Red Mansions not only indicates that the character’s personality,but also has a predictive effect on the fate of the characters;comparing and analyzing the image translation in the poems from the perspective of Cognitive Grammar can convey the meaning more accurately,and Cognitive Grammar also provides a feasible methodology for the contrast and appreciation of different translation versions.