An Analysis Of The English Versions Of Shi Jing From The Perspective Of The Construal Theory

Shi Jing,the earliest collection of poems in China,is a great treasure in Chinese literary and cultural history.As one of the important literary classics,Shi Jing was first translated into foreign languages in the 17th century.Since the 19th century,Shi Jing has many different English versions.The She King by British sinologist James Legge and Book of Poetry by Chinese translator Xu Yuanchong are typical representatives.This thesis compares and analyzes these two English versions based on the Construal Theory with the purpose of finding differences between their different ways of construing the same situations or images in the process of translating and the causes of those differences.The Construal Theory is an important branch of cognitive linguistics.The "construal" means that people have the ability to recognize,understand and explain the surrounding things.They can employ different ways to construe the same situations or images.The American linguist,Ronald Wayne Langacker,was the first to introduce the Construal Theory into cognitive linguistics.He divides the Construal Theory into five aspects:scope,background,perspective,prominence and specificity.The Chinese linguist Wang Yin considers that scope and background practically mean the same and can be combined as one concept.Langacker agrees with him.That is to say,for the construal of the same situation,people may have different ways of understanding.They may construe and perceive different meanings of the same situation based on their different background knowledge.They can spotlight the different parts in which they are interested,choose different perspectives and finally express the meanings specifically or conciselyThis thesis chooses the English translations of some representative poems from those two English versions of Shi Jing to study and analyze based on the four aspects(scope and background,perspective,prominence,specificity)of the Construal Theory.It finds that the meanings of some original poems are construed differently by Xu Yuanchong and James Legge due to their different backgrounds of encyclopedic knowledge.They employ different personal pronouns in their translations from different perspectives.As for the translation of rhyme,reduplicated words,antithesis and parallelism in the original poems,they highlight different aspects in which they are most interested.Most poems in Shi Jing are concise but contain profound meanings.In translating some words and verses of the original poems,they choose different levels of specificity and translate specifically or concisely.Therefore,they produced different translations based on those different ways of the construal.Based on the theoretical framework of the Construal Theory,the study on the translations of Shi Jing can hopefully provide not only a new perspective of poetry translation and research but also a boost in the international spread of Chinese classics.