帕尔默文化语言学视角下《毛泽东诗词》的意象翻译研究－以许渊冲英译本为例

本文是一篇语言学毕业论文，本文根据帕尔默文化语言学理论关于意象的感觉对等原则、空间对等原则、转换对等原则和结构对等原则，以许渊冲《毛泽东诗词》英译本为主要研究对象。

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
Mao Zedong is a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist, founder ofPeople’s Republic of China, and has made indelible contributions to the liberation of greatrevolution and Chinese people. He is also an outstanding poet, and his poetry reflects hisambition and his heroic and grand together with magnificent rare gifts and bold strategy, chicstyle loved by the masses of the people. Asignificant difference between Mao Zedong and otherpoets is that he served as the party and state leaders for a long time, as a matter of fact he is thereal “legislator”, while the other poets are only the “legislators” in the figurative sense. MaoZedong as a legislator is qualified and recognized by Chinese people, so is he as the great poet,his achievements in poetry help him to occupy a prominent position in Chinese poetry historyand even in the world. His poems have been translated into foreign languages and spread tomany countries in the world. For more than half a century, Mao Zedong’s poetry full of uniqueartistic style and charm with Chinese characteristics are beneficial to materialize combination oftraditional and modern culture. With the publication, distribution and spread to all over theworld, according to the Chinese American writer Nie Hualing’s statistics, by the end oftwentieth Century, thousands of books of Mao Zedong’s poems have been sold to the world, thequality of English versions of Mao Zedong’s poems may influence understanding andappreciation of the reader directly.
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1.2 Purpose of the Study
Mao Zedong’s poetry is quoted and cited extensively by way of corroboration due to itsconcern about the past and the present, its ambition and intriguing, and its combination ofromanticism and realism and its rich imagery in particular. There are many images that appearin Mao Zedong’s poems reflecting China’s profound and long history. Therefore, the study ofimage translation in Mao Zedong’s poems is very necessary.
The author of this thesis will carry out an investigation into the translation of images inMao Zedong’s poems, using both descriptive and qualitative methods for an analysis of XuYuanchong’s translated version. The purpose of the present study is to verify the applicability ofPalmer’s cultural linguistics in analyzing the translation of images in Chinese classical poemsand Mao Zedong’s poems in particular as well as to what extent this theory has an explanatorypower for the study of image translation based on the four equivalence principles. Also, theauthor wants to explore the close relationship among language, culture and image through athorough analysis of the samples chosen from Mao Zedong’s poems. Finally, the authorattempts to propose some strategies for the translation of images in Chinese poems based on XuYuanchong’s translated version.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Overview of Palmer’s Cultural Linguistics
Palmer’s Cultural Linguistics is a classical theory to study images, and domestic andforeign scholars have a systematic research on Cultural Linguistics. Palmer held that cognitivelinguistics can be applied to the study of language and culture directly, and further pointed outthat the cognitive linguistics is associated with the key method of the three traditional linguisticanthropology.（Palmer, 1996:11). Cultural linguistics highlights the tradition of primary schoolin China, western culture highlights linguistic tradition, while Palmer’s cultural linguisticshighlights the characteristics of cognitive linguistics. The author of this thesis will introduce theorigin and development and main contents of this theory in the following sections.
2.1.1 Origin and Development of Palmer’s Cultural Linguistics
For the thirty years from the 1950s to the 1970s, the structural linguists in the UnitedStates defined their own points of view and published a number of related research results in thefield of linguistics. Most of these research results are in ethnosemantics or in the framework ofthe national science, pursuing the organization definition methods of meaning from the degreeof culture, which are the methods with the component analysis and the basic characteristics ofthe classification in taxology.
The theoretical background of Palmer’s cultural linguistics is the three branches ofAmerican anthropological linguistics and cognitive linguistics is its theoretical core. (1)Language is an important carrier of culture, and one of the most famous and earliest researcheson language and culture is the “Sapir-Whorf’s Hypothesis”, which is called linguisticsrelativism, while Palmer’s cultural linguistics is constructed on the assumption of linguisticrelativity. Then, studying language and culture together for the first time has been made byPalmer, an American well-known Linguistics Anthropologist, whose theory is now called“Culture Linguistics” in the book Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. (Palmer, 1996: 19).
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2.2 Previous Studies of Image Translation in Poems
Image is the key point of cultural linguistics, and Palmer’s cultural linguistics has providedthe solid theoretical foundation for the study on the English translation of Chinese poems.Based on the characteristics of the image, image has a strong explanatory power to thecognition form of translation. It is necessary to understand and grasp the cultural background ofthe original poem, as well as experience of the author of the original poem, and transfer thebackground knowledge to the target readers as much as possible in the translation of poeticimages. The following will be an overview of image translation from two aspects of domesticresearch and foreign researches of some predecessors, who discuss the views on imagetranslation. Also, the author states the origin and development and the climax of imagetranslation. In addition, some of the key issues plaguing translators in image translation are putforward in the thesis, for example, what kind of image translation methods are used and whatare the advantages of using image translation principles and what are the differences betweenChinese scholars and foreign scholars about image translation. By studying the translation ofthese images, the author hopes it will be of great help to image translation.
Transferring image is mainly from three aspects in China. (Li Jiaqiang, 2009). First, as akind of translation skills, focusing on idioms, proverbs, allusions and adjective words. Second,emphasizing the reader's psychological response from the psychological point of view of thetranslation of image language. Thirdly, researching the understanding and expression of someimages from the perspective of cultural comparison. In recent years, there have been manyresearches mainly based on Hermeneutics, Aesthetics of Reception to discuss imageconstruction and translation.
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Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework.................15
3.1 Palmer’s Cultural Linguistics...........................15
3.1.1 Image in Palmer’s Cultural Linguistics...............16
3.1.2 Cognitive Perspective in Palmer’s Cultural Linguistics ......17
Chapter 4 A Cultural Linguistics Based Study of Image Translation in Xu Yuanchong’sEnglish Version of Mao Zedong’s Poems......................27
4.1 Classification of Images and Image Translation..........................27
4.1.2 Social Cultural Image.......................29
4.1.3Allusion Cultural Image............................31
Chapter 5 Conclusion.......................57
5.1 Major Findings of the Study...............57
5.2 Limitations of the Study....................57

Chapter 4 A Cultural Linguistics Based Study of ImageTranslation in Xu Yuanchong’s English Version of Mao Zedong’sPoems

4.1 Classification of Images and Image Translation
According to the definition of image given in Palmer’s cultural linguistics, “Image datesfrom the conceptual similarity of the immediate sensory experience of peripheral senses as themental representation, the image is a conceptual analogue of the immediate sensory experienceof the immediate sense of the senses, as they are similar to the external experience, which arean indirect conceptual similarity of the external environment. Generally speaking, it involvesthe society and natural phenomena as well as the processing of our body and senses. It alsorefers to organic sensation, such as visual sense, auditory sense, olfactory sense, kinestheticsense.” (Palmer, 1996:47).
In terms of this definition, image can be showed in human’s brain, which can be directlyformed by something being seen. In addition, indirect perception can also be made of image.Because, memory, imagination, idea and conception are formed by collecting experience, thiskind of experience will be processed several times by language and culture. As we havementioned before, language, culture and image are the three essential elements in Palmer’scultural linguistics. Image which is frequently seen in literature is a combination of culture andlanguage. It is composed by language and delivers culture message from nation to nation. So itis commonly known as the convention, people depending on the similar background, sharedview of the world known to image in the context of changing circumstances, only to build up inthe social culture that people can rely on the reliable reference discourse. It means that the samebackground knowledge can easily be understood by speaker and listener (writer and reader).
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Chapter 5 Conclusion

5.1 Major Findings of the Study

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