On The Translation Of Conventional And Novel Metaphors From Cognitive And Pragma-cognitive Perspectives

In the present thesis, an analysis is made of the nature of metaphor and metaphor comprehension from cognitive and pragma-cognitive approaches. From the former approach, metaphor is used to provide a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience and it results from mappings from one conceptual area to another conceptual area. In the final analysis, it is a way of thinking and conceptualization. The cognitive approach shows the metaphorical meaning is the result of mappings from source domains to target domains, but it doesn't account for how the readers reach the metaphorical meaning from the linguistic form. Fortunately, the pragma-cognitive approach which focuses on context and inference bridges the gap. Therefore, metaphor is not only a kind of semantic cognitive phenomenon but also a pragmatic cognitive phenomenon. In the present thesis, metaphors are categorized as either conventional or novel and their differences are pointed out from the cognitive and pragma-cognitive perspectives.Moreover, the two approaches are further applied to metaphor translation in the thesis. From the cognitive perspective, due to the cultural-specificity, the psychological mechanism characterized by mappings across source domains and target domains can't be replicated in translation. But conceptual systems to which metaphors give structure can be transferred thanks to similar cognitive abilities among people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, hence the primary standard for metaphor translation. From the pragma-cognitive perspective, metaphor interpretation is essentially a dynamic relevance-seeking process involving factors such as linguistic input, context factors, cultural factors and processing efforts. Therefore, equivalence in terms of readers' dynamic relevance-seeking process shall be pursued at the same time.Given the prominent differences in the above-mentioned factors involved in the dynamic relevance-seeking process with respect to conventional and novel metaphor interpretation, different translation principles shall be followed: domestication shall be followed primarily for conventional metaphor translation and alienation, for novel metaphor translation. But affected by the microcosmic factors such as readers' responses, translation is also influenced by the macrocosmic cultural factors, for which more specific translation strategies are proposed in the thesis as well.