A Cognitive Translatological Study Of The Multimodal Comics Of The Analects Of Confucius

The Analects of Confucius,an all-time Chinese classic,is an important way for Western scholars to understand Chinese culture and society.Its effective translation promotes cross-cultural communication between China and the West.However,most of the attention the Analects has received is restricted to the scholarly circle.This has prompted attempts from translators,translation researchers,and experts in related fields to improve its acceptance among the general readership.Among these efforts,Tsai Chih Chung’s comic adaptation of the Analects proves to be quite influential,and its English edition has garnered much attention from the Western readers.The present study looks at the cognitive operations underlying the relay processes of the transcreation and the subsequent English translation of the comic series of the Analects and studies how these cognitive operations contribute to meaning creation and facilitate translation in these two respective processes.This thesis attempts to describe and explain how the comics series of the Analects are created,adapted and translated from a cognitive translatological perspective.Drawing on Jakobson’s tripartite classification of translation and the concept of construal from cognitive linguistics,this thesis tentatively proposes a cognitive translatological framework of intralingual,interlingual and intersemiotic translation to uncover the complex cognitive operations that embody the relay processes of creation and translation of the comic series in question.Through the analysis of a relatively extensive amount of multimodal texts,the study has drawn the following conclusions: First,during intralingual and intersemiotic translation,the author of the comic series has adopted a series of visualization strategies based on the cognitive operations of metaphor,metonymy,level of specificity,perspective.Through these strategies,the author succeeds in constructing and reconstructing meaning by re-contextualizing the Analects,which helps bring Confucius and his ideas closer to the general readers.Second,during interlingual and intersemiotic translation,cognitive operations of metaphor,metonymy,level of specificity,perspective and framing have been evoked to not only realize the additional meaning constructed during visualization but also achieve a higher visual and verbal synergy of the translated text.The employment of diverse cognitive translational strategies caters the comics to the Western readership.The present study offers some tips for future attempts at comic adaptation and translation of Chinese classics so that they can be better received and,more importantly,better appreciated by readers in China and abroad.