A Parallel Corpus-based Study Of English Translation Of Wine Culture In Three Kingdoms From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

With the development of society,the strategy of “Chinese culture going out”,including wine culture,is no longer just a slogan,but gradually reflected in the foreign translation of excellent Chinese literary works.As a Chinese literary treasure,Three Kingdoms contains a rich culture with Chinese characteristics,which reflects the wine culture of the Three Kingdoms period（ca.220-280 A.D.）in detail.There are more than 300 references to “酒”;almost all of the more than 1200 people drink some wine;there are many popular drinking scenes and drinking allusions in the book.It can be seen that the wine culture in Three Kingdoms cannot be ignored.However,among the many English translation studies of Three Kingdoms,few people have made a systematic and comprehensive study on the English translation of wine culture.This thesis selects the original and Moss Roberts’ s English version as the corpus,establishes a bilingual parallel corpus of Three Kingdoms with the help of CUC Para Conc,and finds and marks the description of wine culture in the corpus.Then the author reads the text carefully,analyzes how Moss construed and translated the wine culture in the original from the four cognitive dimensions of perspective,scope/background,prominence,and specificity,explores the impact of the translator’s subjectivity on the translation,and tries to display the explanatory power of construal theory in the cognitive process of cultural translation.This study finds that the content of the translation of wine culture in Three Kingdoms is not completely consistent with the original for the translator has his own subjectivity and has different cognitive methods and abilities from the original author.The differences in scope and background are the significant reasons for the differences in cultural transmission when translators construe the wine culture;even if the same scene is described,Moss would make corresponding changes in the perspective and prominence due to the consideration of the cognitive ability and acceptance of the target language readers and the habitual expression of the target language;moreover,Moss claimed that the translation of Three Kingdoms was to convey Chinese culture and promote the academic research of Chinese culture,and he would add some annotations to Chinese wine culture unfamiliar to readers,so his translation is also more detailed.The innovation of the study is chiefly represented in the attempt to establish a shared bilingual corpus of Moss’ s translation of Three Kingdoms,and try to compare and analyze the processing of wine culture-related content between the original and the translation of this novel,so as to explore the cognitive tendency of Moss in the translation of wine culture.However,Three Kingdoms goes on at considerably greater length,which is difficult for the author to establish a one-to-many corpus in a short time.It only analyzes Moss’ s construal of the wine culture in the original,which would lead to the lack of comparison between translators when analyzing the subjectivity of the translator.Hence the author also needs to make a horizontal comparison of wine culture between different versions in the follow-up to perfect this study.