A Study Of Deviation In The English Translation Of The Scarecrow From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

The Scarecrow is the most representative children’s literature of Ye Shengtao,and its unique originality and literariness make it a landmark in the history of modern Chinese children’s literature.Among the existing English translations,the version translated by Tang Sheng is the most widely disseminated.The literature review shows almost no research on this translation,and its translation characteristics have yet to be studied.Deviation is a common phenomenon in children’s literature translation.Translators with a child-oriented view tend to make specific processing of the translated text to cater to the limited cognitive and receptive abilities of children readers,at the expense of deviating from the source text.This phenomenon has received increasing academic attention in recent years,but the study of deviations in children’s literature translation is insufficient.The Construal Theory of cognitive linguistics has brought new ideas for understanding deviations in children’s literature translation.Construal refers to the ability of people to perceive and describe the same situation in different ways.Translation is a process of meaning construction or conceptualization,which is the result of construing.Therefore,the Construal Theory can help to reveal the motives and cognitive laws behind the translation process of children’s literature.So this study uses qualitative research and comparative textual analysis to investigate the deviation of construal in the English translation of The Scarecrow,a representative work of Chinese children’s literature,from five dimensions of the Construal Theory,namely perspective,selection,prominence,dynamicity,and imagination.The study finds that the English version of The Scarecrow is as faithful as possible to the original construal,but there are still 11 significant deviations,including: the emphasis of subjectivity,conversion of affirmative and negative expressions,transformation of culture-loaded words,simplification of sentences,specification of words,change of temporal and spatial scanning,and the paraphrase of reduplicated words,onomatopoeia,metonymy,metaphor and simile.According to the Construal Theory,the emphasis of subjectivity,conversion of affirmative and negative expressions,transformation of culture-loaded words can be seen as the deviation of perspective.Simplification of sentences,specification of words can be seen as the deviation of selection.The paraphrase of reduplicated words,onomatopoeia and paraphrase can be seen as the deviation of prominence.Furthermore,change of temporal and spatial scanning can be view as the deviation of dynamicity.In addition,paraphrase of metaphor and simile can be seen as the deviation of imagination.The construal deviations in the English translation of The Scarecrow can be attributed to the translator’s misunderstanding of the original text and the lack of literacy in children’s literature translation.The translation of children’s literature should achieve the equivalence of accuracy,readability and literariness for children.This thesis hopes to provide a new perspective for studying the translation of children’s literature: the cognitive perspective.It also aims to inspire translators to pay attention to the phenomenon of cognitive deviation so that the quality of Chinese children’s literature translated into English can be further improved,and its dissemination overseas can be promoted.