A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Fire-Taken Child(Chapter 16-22) From The Perspective Of Discourse Scenarios In Cultural Linguistic Theory

In this translation task,the translator chooses seven stories from Fire-taken Child,a collection of the stories of Hani and Yi ethnic groups,as the source texts.Six of them are the Hani stories and one is the Yi story.The literature of the Hani ethnic group belongs to the oral literature.Although the Yi people have their own characters,these seven stories are all narrated by the Hani and Yi people,and then recorded by the second person in Chinese characters.These seven stories belong to the folklores and their language style is colloquial,which shows the Hani and Yi people’s excellent qualities of diligence,kindness,bravery,honesty and filial piety.These stories not only reflect their living conditions,but also contain rich cultural connotations,which are worthy of research and translation.The purpose of this translation task is to explore how cultural linguistics guides the translation of folk literature through studying the literary works of the Hani and Yi ethnic groups,so that the target text can better show the charm of their ethnic culture.In order to solve these problems,the translator chooses Palmer’s cultural linguistics as translation guiding theory to study this translation task from its perspective of discourse scenarios.Palmer uses the key concepts of cognitive linguistics,such as imagery and schema,as the research tools to study discourse from the cultural dimension,which constructs discourse scenarios,a model to analyze discourse.Discourse scenarios integrate five basic schemas:participation schemas,speech acts schemas,sequencing schemas,perspective schemas and ideational schemas.With the guidance of the discourse scenarios,the translator,based on the source text,repairs and optimizes its discourse,and adopts translation methods such as substitution,inversion and annotation in an appropriate way in the translation process.As a result,the quality of the translation has been greatly improved.In this process,the translator finds that participation schemas can help explore the invisible participants’ influence in the stories to figure out the cultural connotation behind the stories;speech acts schemas will help the translator to explore the instinct motivation of the characters’ behaviors so as to describe the characters more vividly;sequencing schemas will help the translator clarify the logical order in the source text and the target text;perspective schemas will enhance or weaken the subjective and objective degree of readers’ participation in the text accordingly;and the ideational schemas will help the translator to solve the translation problems of culture-loaded words.Moreover,the translator sincerely hopes that the preliminary exploration of this thesis can provide new ideas for further translation studies in this field.