The Representation of Artistic Conception of “Hetangyuese”
-- A study on the translation strategies from the perspective of grammatical metaphor
Abstract

Prose with beautiful language and profound artistic conception is an indispensible part of Chinese literature and also a platform to spread the distinctive Chinese culture. Therefore, it is important to make foreigners truly understand the connotations of the source text through appropriate translation strategies. Hetangyuese, written by Zhu Ziqing, is a representative of Chinese classics with refined language and high artistic value. The strategies employed to represent its artistic conception and maintain its original flavor will guide the translation practices of other Chinese prose.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, which makes the exploration of meaning as the core of linguistic study, has long been functioning as the theoretical foundations for translation study. Applications of its theories such as metafunction and transitivity are introduced to translation field and present fruitful achievements. As the ideational function, a subordinate function of metafunction, refers to that language is used to represent both the outer and inner world experience of human beings, which is similar in some aspects to the connotations of artistic conception, its corresponding theory of ideational metaphor then may be instructive in exploring the reconstruction of artistic conception. This thesis makes an analysis and assessment of three English versions of Hetangyuese within the framework of grammatical metaphor, and discusses the different conveying effects caused by different employment of transitivity metaphor and nominalization, and then sums up the translation strategies. The whole thesis is divided into five chapters: the first chapter is the introduction of research background, subject and purpose; the second chapter reviews the relevant theories of artistic conception and functional linguistics; the third chapter is an overview of Hetangyuese; in the fourth chapter, the translations of Zhu Chunshen, Wang Jiaosheng and David Pollard are studied and evaluated on the basis of grammatical metaphor, so as to see the different levels of artistic conception representation and then propose two translation strategies. The last chapter is a conclusion of the major findings and limitations.

Key words: artistic conception, grammatical metaphor, Hetangyuese, translation strategy