Geospace translation strategies and their cognitive construal

Abstract

Since the literary geospace is usually tinged with the author’s embodied experiences, it calls on the translator to restore or reconstruct the ST geospace’s geographical reality or imagination in the target language culture. Based on the embodied cognition of the environment, the translator can wash and negotiate the geographical conceptual system of the ST geospace by resorting to the three translation strategies, i.e., retention, reconstruction, and substitution, so as to generate new geospace in the geographical conceptual system of the TL. The article aims to analyze geospace translation strategies from the perspective of conceptual blending theory. The translator’s use of different translation strategies results from different mapping paths among the spaces of the source text, of the translator, and of the target text. It can illustrate the regularities of the translator’s space mediation in translating the geospace. Retention signifies the single-domain mappings from the space of ST. Substitution indicates the single-domain mappings from the space of the translator. Reconstruction denotes the double-domain mappings from both the spaces of ST and the translator. The emergent structure generated in the space of the target text yields the reterritorialization of the geospace in the target language culture, which can stimulate the reader of TT to get a similar geographical experience to that of the author and to empathize with the author’s sense of place to a greater extent.