An Analysis Of Metaphors In Economic Discourse And The Chinese Translation

Metaphor has always been an area that attracts a lot of attention from philosophers and scholars. However, in the past decades, the study of metaphor has been undergoing dramatic changes. Traditionally, metaphor has always been treated as a figure of speech, aiming at the ornament of languages. From this sense, metaphor does not necessarily appear in every aspect of language. However, in 1980, Lakoff and Johnson published their famous book Metaphor, We Live By, which greatly changes people's opinions about metaphor and servers as the turning point in the development of metaphor. This book points out that metaphor is more than a rhetoric device; it is also way of cognition, which can be found in people's language, thinking and culture. As a method of thinking and an effective cognitive tool, metaphor can help people comprehend the abstract intangible concepts and phenomena in terms of the concrete, well known ones.The rapid development of economy promotes the emergence of many new and abstract concepts in economic discourse. When encountering unfamiliar things, people tend to use what they have known or experienced to understand the new ones. In this process, the role of metaphor is obvious. Therefore, metaphor becomes an important tool to understand and structure new abstract economic concepts and phenomena. Along with the rapid development of global economy, communication between different countries increases. In this process, people may often come across other languages, which would involve translation. And the translation of metaphors in economic discourse seems more important since they serve as the cognitive tools. Based on former studies, this thesis tries to apply contemporary metaphor theories to explore the characteristics and translation strategies of metaphors in economic discourse to help people enhance metaphorical awareness and better understand the complicated economic concepts and phenomena in both English and Chinese. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The following is a general introduction of each part.Chapter One is the basic introduction of related issues involving in the thesis, including the research background, the data and methodology, the significance and the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two is about the literature review. It mainly reviews the development of metaphor theory, previous metaphor studies in economic discourse both at home and abroad, as well as the development of metaphor translation. This chapter gives a systematic account of the process of metaphor development, ranging from treating metaphor merely as a rhetoric device to realizing its cognitive function. Then it discusses how metaphor in economic discourse gradually attracts attention from both economists and linguists. At last, it reveals the translation strategies concerning about metaphor.Chapter Three presents detailed explanation to metaphor in economic discourse. Firstly, the definition and working mechanism are mainly illustrated. Metaphor, in fact, is a series of mappings in which the familiar and experienced source domain is applied to understand the unknown target domain based on the correlation and similarities between the two domains. Then the characteristics, cognitive functions and classifications of metaphor in economic discourse are discussed. As a cognitive tool, metaphor is pervasive in economic discourse. Nevertheless, due to different historical, political, economic and cultural background, metaphors have national characteristics. Some metaphors are exclusive to certain countries. Besides, metaphor has four cognitive functions which are:metaphor serves as the foundation of conceptual system; metaphor provides chances for people to understand or experience one thing in terms of another; metaphor provides new perspective to the knowledge of a thing; people can utilize the analogy feature of metaphor to reason things out and persuade other people. In this thesis, metaphors in economic discourse are mainly divided into four types:orientational metaphor, structural metaphor, ontological metaphor as well as container metaphor. The characteristics, the cognitive function and the categories of metaphors in economic discourse provide the theoretical basis for the exploration of the translation strategies in chapter Four.Chapter Four explores the translation strategies of metaphors in economic discourse. Here it mainly gives three translation strategies:reserving the images of the metaphor, changing the images of the metaphor and abandoning the images of the metaphor in the source language. As for the remaining image, four situations are offered:replication or literal translation, replication with metaphorical meaning, replication with note as well transferring the metaphor into simile. Replacing the image is also called metonymy way of translation which means to use a Chinese metaphor with the similar meaning to replace the metaphor in the source language. However, if the above two ways of translation do not work, the image of the metaphor in the source language has to be abandoned since one of the aims of translation is to transfer information. There are two situations about the abandoning of the image strategy. One is that the reader can not understand the literal translated image. The other the translated version disagrees with Chinese language habits.Chapter Five is the conclusion of the thesis. It summarizes the findings, points out the limitations and provides suggestions for future studies.To conclude, the author attempts to investigate metaphors in economic discourse by relating contemporary metaphor theory with the practical economic discourse interpretation, trying to find related translation strategies. The author hopes this thesis may shed some light on both the contemporary metaphor theory in economic discourse and the study of metaphor translation. However, this thesis also has limitations. The author hopes more studies about the translation of metaphors in economic discourse will be done in the future.