Compensation Of Interpersonal Meanings In Translating Mood Metaphors Of Hong Lou Meng

Since Halliday advanced the notion of grammatical metaphor to describe theincongruity of meaning and form at the grammatical level, some scholars at home tryto apply it to the studies of Chinese language. In recent years, there are also papers oncontrastive studies of English and Chinese interpersonal metaphors. However, fewefforts have been made to study the interpersonal meanings conveyed by moodmetaphor in Chinese and their preservation and compensation in translation. Thispaper suggests that such studies are necessary in that the similarities and differencesof mood metaphors in English and Chinese are easily neglected and frequently lead toinequivalence in interpersonal meanings in the process of translation.This paper conducts a contrastive and comparative analysis of mood metaphorsin the original text of Hong Lou Meng and its two translated versions within theframework of interpersonal metafunction of systemic functional grammar. It attemptsto explore the realization and modal effects of Chinese mood metaphor and bridge thegap of interpersonal meanings in translation.By means of detailed analysis, the author of the present paper concludes thatmood metaphors are frequently used for rhetorical effects in both Chinese and English.Under certain circumstances, usually when mood metaphor is realized withoutassistance of modal particles, similar metaphorical choice of mood can be directlyused in English. Otherwise, congruent form or different mood choices have to be used,and the loss of modal meanings should be compensated through other grammaticalcomponents such as (1) modal operators and modal adjuncts used separately or incombination to signal different modal values;(2) shift in polarity to strengthen orweaken the mood intended in the original text;(3) various choices of orientation tocompensate interpersonal meanings through emphasizing subjectivity or objectivity ofthe proposal or proposition. The author claims that special modal effects can beachieved through different orientations of which explicit expressions (i.e. metaphor inmodality) are particularly effective in compensating interpersonal meanings intendedin the original text. This paper provides a new solution to achieving equivalence of interpersonalmeanings and is expected to be conducive to further studies in this area.