Study On The English Translation Of The "Tian Wen" From The Perspective Of Image-G Actualization

The Chu ci is the first collection of romantic poetry in the history of Chinese literature.Its content and form have a strong regional cultural color,and are extremely rich in literary and artistic value.It enjoys a high position in the history of Chinese literature.The “Tian wen” is one of the famous chapters of the Chu ci,and also the second longest poem by Qu Yuan.It is known as “the masterpiece throughout the ages”.The “Tian wen” is broad and profound in meaning,and its artistic form is unique and innovative.It is composed of 172 questions.It covers everything from heaven to earth,mountains to rivers,the universe to the past of humans and the change of dynasties.It raises the questions that remain to be answered,which shows the author’s pursuit of truth and doubts about some traditional concepts.At present,some achievements have been made in the study of intralingual translation of the “Tian wen”,but the study of its interlingual translation is still in its infancy.Gestalt image is a concept originated from Gestalt psychology.Mary SnellHornby,a famous German translation theorist,proposed that the wholeness of Gestalt can be used in the study of literary translation.Professor Jiang Qiuxia introduced the image-G reproduction model,emphasizing on the reproduction of the Gestalt quality of the original text in the translation.Based on the theory of Gestalt image actualization,this thesis attempts to make a comparative study of the English versions of the “Tian wen” by Xu Yuanchong,a Chinese scholar-translator,and Gopal Sukhu,an American sinologist.The main research questions include:(1)what types of image-Gs are there in the “Tian wen” ?;(2)how does the target text achieve the same aesthetic effect as the source text according to the reconstruction of the Gestalt image in the “Tian wen” ?;(3)based on the cognitive principle of image-G,what translation strategies are used in the English translation of the “Tian wen” ?;(4)what implications can be obtained from this study for the translation of classics ?.Gestalt psychology emphasizes the holistic view that the whole is not the mere sum of its parts,and the whole can be deconstructed into closely inter-related parts.Therefore,this thesis classifies the image-Gs in the “Tian wen” into three categories,namely,macro-image-G,meso-image-G,and micro-image-G.From macro to micro dimensions,the image-Gs are dissected layer by layer,which are separated from and closely related to each other,illustrating the specific manifestations of the representation of image-Gs in the “Tian wen”.In addition,according to the three principles of image-G cognition proposed by Professor Jiang Qiuxia,this thesis summarizes the cognitive translation strategies and methods of image-G actualization,aiming at exploring the translation strategies of effective representation of image-G,so as to provide enlightenments for Chinese culture “going global”.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction,which mainly introduces the research background and significance,research questions,research methods and the basic structure of the thesis.The second chapter is a literature review,in which the previous studies on the English translation of the “Tian wen” and the application of the image-G in the translation studies field are presented.The third chapter is the theoretical basis which constructs a theoretical framework for the recognition and reproduction of image-Gs in the “Tian wen”.The fourth chapter is the main part of this thesis.Taking the English versions of the “Tian wen” as the object of study,the author deeply analyzes the gains and losses of the two translators in the reproduction of the image-G from the perspective of the image-G actualization,and discusses the cognitive translation strategies and techniques of image-G actualization in combination with the findings of the previous studies,so as to see what efforts the translators need to make to achieve the effective transmission of the image-G of literary classics in the translation process.The fifth chapter is the conclusion,which summarizes the main findings of this study,and points out the limitations of the study,as well as the problems that need to be solved in future research.The findings of this study are as follows:First of all,the “Tian wen”,as a lengthy classical poem,has a unique Gestalt quality in artistic structure and poetic form.The premise for the reconstruction of image-G is that the translator can have an overall understanding of Gestalt quality and poetic artistic conception in the aesthetic image of poetry,and build an overall cognitive schema;Secondly,the translator’s interpretation of poetry is a top-down process.In this process,the principles of gestalt psychological organization,such as similarity,closeness and heterogeneous isomorphism,work together to build a cognitive path for translators to discern the aesthetic characteristics of image-Gs;Finally,based on the translator’s understanding of image-Gs,we can correspondingly adopt image replacement,image highlighting,implication compensation and other translation methods to achieve the effective transformation of image-Gs in the target language and reproduce the aesthetic characteristics of poetry.