A Study On Translation Techniques Of Characters' Action Description In Novels Based On Gestalt Theory

From the perspective of Gestalt Theory,the translation techniques of Gatsby's action description in Yao Naiqiang's Version of The Great Gatsby are analyzed.Gestalt psychology proposes that cognition process involves five cognitive principles,namely the principle of wholeness,the principle of closure,the principle of proximity,the principle of heterogeneous isomorphism and the principle of figure-background,which can be used to explain the translator's cognition of the source text and the construction process of the target text.Based on the five cognitive principles of Gestalt Theory,the translation techniques of action description in Yao Naiqiang's translation of The Great Gatsby are analyzed.At the very beginning,the corpus of Gatsby's action description is collected and then classified into five categories according to the sentence elements: subject,predicate,object,adverbial and complement.Through comparison of the source text and the target text and literature analysis,the translation techniques of the action description are studied.Specifically,addition is used to translate predicates,adverbials and complements;omission is used to translate adverbials;shift is used in all kinds of categories,combination is used to translate two subjects of clauses that constitute a compound sentence;division is used to translate objects and adverbials.Finally,based on the analysis of the application of the above translation techniques,the applicability of the five Gestalt principles for the selection of translation techniques of characters' action description in novels is concluded: under the guidance of the principle of heterogeneous isomorphism,shift can be used to translate rhetorical devices;under the guidance of the principle of closure,addition can be used to translate the default information;under the guidance of the principle of wholeness,addition and omission can be used on modifiers and qualifiers,and shift can be used to translate words in the source text;under the guidance of the principle of proximity,shift of word order can be used;under the guidance of the principle of figure-background,shift can be used to translate subjects and predicates,and combination and division are also applicable.