Chinese-English Translation Strategies For Resultative Constructions: A Perspective Of Time-Space Conceptualization

The resultative construction has aroused heated discussions in the field of linguistics because of its various syntactic expressions and the complex semantic relationship between its components,but there are relatively few studies on cross linguistic comparison and interlingual transformation strategies.Based on findings of previous literature and data from corpora,this study compares the syntactic patterns of Chinese and English resultative constructions.The difference between them is mainly reflected in the juxtaposition of verbs and complements in Chinese,and the separation of predicate verbs and result complements with objects in English.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,it is the conflation and distinction of “temporal” action events and “spatial” result events in the concept of metaphor.The fundamental reason is the difference of conceptualization of time and space between the two languages.Chinese is characterized by time-space conflation,but in English,the time and space concepts are distinct.Because of the wide range of applications,the high frequency of occurrence and the flexibility of sentence patterns of Chinese resultative constructions,the translation study is of profound significance,and the difference in the syntactic structure between Chinese and English resultative constructions has caused some difficulties in translation.Guided by cognitive linguistics,especially the theory of time-space conceptual differences between Chinese and English,this study analyzes the English translation strategies of Chinese resultative constructions.The three types of strategies are:(1)concord method,i.e.,using a counterpart variant of the resultative construction;(2)adjustment method,i.e.,using a different(noncounterpart)variant of the resultative construction;(3)free method,e.g.lexicalization,adding markers for the cause and result event or using non-resultatives.According to the four-type classification system(prototypical resultatives,resultatives with unselected objects,resultatives with no object and Chinese special sentence patterns with resultatives),this thesis details the use of Chinese-English translation strategies of resultatives in specific linguistics contexts.To further analyze the difficulties in the translation of resultatives,this research divides each category of Chinese resultatives into subtypes according to the orientation of the resultative complement,the transitivity of the agent predicate verb and the active and passive voices of the whole construction.A questionnaire survey was conducted among MTI students in China.The problems reflected in the translated texts and the translation methods used by the research participants are investigated and analyzed in order to examine the application of the translation strategies proposed in this study and to ascertain the reasons for the differences in time and space concepts embodied in them.It offers some pedagogical implications for MTI education.The study of Chinese-English resultative translation strategies from a time-space conceptualization perspective opens up a new area of research at the intersection of translatology and cognitive linguistics,and is really important to language typology,translation studies,cognitive linguistics,and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Additionally,it has implications for both theoretical research and practical application.