A Study Of English Translation Of Emotional Metaphors In The Book Of Songs

As the origin of Chinese classical poetry,The Book of Songs has a unique status in the study of the translation of Chinese classics because of its refined and emotionally charged language,and its forms are neat mostly in four characters,combined with fu,bi,and xing.The study of the translation of The Book of Songs has a history of more than200 years with fruitful results of researches mainly focusing on studies on translations,studies on translators,studies on translation strategies and studies on constraints in translation.Despite studies mentioned above,there is still room for in-depth research on the English translation of the emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs.Translation is a process in which the translator conducts cognitive operations to the original text,reconstructs the content obtained after the first stage,and presents it to the reader through the second stage of cognitive construal.According to the cognitive construal theory proposed by Langacker in 2008,the translator first selects the content to be translated,in which a series of relevant background knowledge is going to be activated.At the same time,the translator makes a corresponding choice of perspective,and different cognitive subjects will choose different perspectives and produce different linguistic expressions.In the process of translation,not all relevant knowledge needs to be listed,and the translator should selectively make the parts he wants to transmit to the target text readers prominent and depict them in detail,while the content that the translator chooses to place in the background should be described briefly.Since people’s feelings are abstract and intangible,the expression and transmission of emotions need helps by means of emotional metaphors.There appear a lot of expressions containing emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs,and the division of dimensions in the cognitive construal theory proposed by Langacker in 2008 is suitable for the study of emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs.Based on Langacker’s definition of dimensions in cognitive construal theory,Pound’s English version of The Book of Songs is selected to conduct an in-depth discussion on Pound’s construal operations in the English translation of the emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs,specifically analyzing the typical emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs,construal operations conducted by Pound,the cognitive features and their textual effects embodied in Pound’s English translation operations.The findings of the study are as follows.First of all,the emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs are roughly divided into the following five categories: the emotional metaphors of anger,adoration,sadness,happiness and missing,among which the emotional metaphors of adoration and anger account for more of them and are reflected in the poems of marriage and abandonment in The Book of Songs,followed by the emotional metaphors of missing and sadness.Secondly,in his English translation of the emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs,Pound mainly has the following operations of recognition knowledge interpretation:(1)addition and omission of emotional metaphors and the use of hyponym;(2)preservation of emotional metaphors,adaptation of emotional metaphors,and recreation of emotional metaphors;(3)the use of syntactic transformations and the use of personal pronouns;(4)using images with similar connotations to the source text and dismantling the characters to explore the imagery combinations embedded in Chinese characters.Thirdly,by combining the Western poetic context and the traditional Chinese culture,Pound conducts creative operations while translating The Book of Songs,focusing on transmitting the emotions and atmosphere of the original text by concrete construal of the emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs,which presents a more subjective English translation of The Book of Songs with the imprint of Pound’s own thinking.Based on the four dimensions of cognitive construal,this study analyzes the cognitive operations and mechanisms of Pound’s English translation of The Book of Songs,finding that despite some over-excavations and misinterpretations,his cognitive operations of translating the emotional metaphors in the original text and his exploration of ancient Chinese poetry and Chinese character not only reduce the cognitive burden of the target text readers and inspire them to make judgments and reflections in the process of reading,but also provide an interesting way for the study of the emotional metaphors in The Book of Songs and offers a possible path for the English translation of emotional metaphors in Chinese classics.