A Study Of Three-Level Relevance Translation From Perspective Of Embodied-Cognitive Translatology

Under the context of the “going global” strategy of Chinese culture,the translation practice of the government work reports involves Chinese and Western cultures,which is an important part of building the Chinese discourse system and plays a very positive role in creating a competent,responsible,and great-nation image of China.As the political article,government work report includes Chinese culture-specific items(such as proper nouns,idioms,allusions and metaphors),which have distinctive Chinese characteristics and features of the times,reflecting the social and cultural background of a certain period.The translation of the government work report requires translators to properly handle the relationship between Chinese and Western cultures.Then,with the “going global” of Chinese culture,how can they not only convey the connotation of Chinese culture and spread Chinese stories,but also enable English readers to understand the translation accurately and smoothly?Culture-specific items refer to words,phrases,and idioms that mark things unique to a culture,and that reflect the unique acting and thinking ways in which a particular ethnic group has gradually accumulated throughout history that are different from other peoples(Liao,2000).From the embodied-cognitive perspective of language and translation,culture-specific items involve the advanced cognitive processing of peoples’ embodied experience,which ultimately lexicalize into linguistic representations.Because different nationalities have different processing approaches,they will have similar or different cognitive processing in the real world.So,translation is not only a linguistic transformation between different languages,but also inevitably involves the “embodiment” and “cognition” behind it,which has put forward higher requirements for the translation of culture-loaded words and has also become a hot research topic.At the present stage,scholars at home and abroad have explored the translation of culture-specific items from the perspectives of rhetoric,cultural translation,metaphor theory and interdisciplinary studies.However,most studies still explore the translation strategies of terms from the perspective of cultural translation theory,and few translation studies are made from the perspective of embodiment and cognition.From the perspective of Embodied-Cognitive Translatology(ECT),this study puts forward Embodied-Cognitive(EC-based)Three-Level Relevance Translation,combining the Embodied-Cognitive Three-Level Translation and Relevance Translation Theory.And this study adopts qualitative and quantitative research methods to further explore the cognitive process and practical significance of the translation practice of Chinese culture-specific items in the government work report(GWR),hoping to enrich the operability of the ECT,providing some reference for the translation practice of GWR,and promoting the Chinese culture to go global.The research questions in this thesis are as follows:(1)When translating Chinese culture-specific items in GWRs,what translation methods do the translator adopt? And what are the proportions of them?(2)Is the translator’s choice of different translation methods related to the experience and cognition of the source and target language readers? If there is relevance,then how are they related?(3)In the translation practice of the GWRs from 2013 to 2022,do the translator’s translation strategies or methods change during this period? If so,what causes them?The findings of this study are as follows:(1)Relevance translation of culture-specific items involves linguistic level,cognitive level,and realistic level.The translation method at the linguistic level involves literal translation;at the cognitive level,translation methods include partial literal plus connotative meaning,replacing image with connotative meaning,replacing image of culture-specific items and omission;the translation method at the realistic level involves interpretation in terms of context.(2)The relevance translation at the linguistic level is the most(52.3%),followed by the cognitive level(43.9%),and at least the realistic level(3.8%).(3)The three-level relevance translation(the linguistic level,cognitive level,and realistic level)respectively reflects the universality of experience and cognition of human beings,the uniqueness of culture and thinking approaches,and target language readers’ lack of experience and cognition on Chinese culture.The three-level translation methods demonstrate the three degrees of cognitive processing that translators pay when dealing with different culture-specific items,that is,translating expressions with universal experience and cognition demands the least cognitive effort,while the greater cognitive effort is required to translate expressions with unique thinking approaches,and the needed cognitive effort to translate expressions with the lack of the target language readers’ experience and cognition on the source language is the greatest,so as to ensure that readers can obtain the optimal relevance.(4)The translation practice of the GWRs from 2013 to 2022 can be divided into two stages: the first is the linguistic-transformation-dominant translation stage(2013-2017),and the second is the linguistic-and-cognitive-balanced translation stage(2018-2022).There are three main reasons for this change:(1)the increasing number of idioms,allusions and metaphors in the second stage,which is mostly translated at the cognitive level;(2)under the background of “going global” of Chinese culture,translators pay more attention to the multiple subjectivities and cultural specificity of GWRs;(3)the translator pursues a dynamic balance between the source text and the acceptance of target readers.