Reporting On The Translation Of The Sacred Flame From The Perspective Of Gestalt Image Actualization Theory

The Sacred Flame is the twenty-first play written by William Somerset Maugham.In this play,Maugham tells a crime story and discusses marriage,morality,female stereotypes,among other topics.One day,Maurice suddenly died and his family doctor Harvester decided to sign the death certificate but Nurse Wayland insisted that Maurice had been murdered by being given an overdose of his sleeping draught.Then his wife Stella became the main suspect because she had an affair with Colin and was pregnant by him.It seems that the truth of the murder was out,however,at the end of the third act,Mrs.Tabret confessed that she was the one who had killed Maurice.For a long time,the studies on drama translation focuses mainly on the translation mode of language conversion,while its aesthetic characteristics have not been paid enough attention to.This report is based on the Image-G Actualization Theory.According to this theory,there are three main steps in the actualization process: first,fully understanding all the information in the source text,second,constructing a holistic view of every gestalt image in the source text,and finally,reconstructing these images in the readers or audiences' mind,and providing them with the same or similar understanding and aesthetic experience of the source text.Under the guidance of Image-G Actualization Theory,the author completed the translation of The Sacred Flame,and selected some cases from the linguistic and aesthetic levels for analysis.Among them,the linguistic level rests mainly on lexical and rhetorical analysis.In terms of the lexical level,the colloquial words,Cross-cultural phrases and the collocation in The Sacred Flame are selected for analysis.With regard to the rhetorical level,the analysis is made from the aspects of simile and parallelism.On the aesthetic level,this paper takes harmony as the basic standard in the realization of image-G,and also the ultimategoal of the translator to reproduce image-G in the translation,and reproduces image-G from the two major gestalt qualities,namely characteristics and dramatic conflicts.Through this translation practice,the author finds that the Image-G Actualization Theory can help the translator to choose the appropriate words in the target language,and can also help to effectively reconstruct aesthetic experience and form a holistic harmony in the target text.