Translation Of Spatial Metaphor SHANG: A Case Study Of English Translation Of XIYOUJI

Since the establishment of Cognitive Metaphor Theory by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in1980, metaphor has been increasingly framed by the perspective of cognitive linguistics rather than traditional rhetoric, so is metaphor translation. Spatial metaphor is one of three cognitive metaphors, in which space is considered to be the source domain which is mapped onto the target domain which is usually abstract. It is believed by cognitive linguists that space has been a privileged position as a foundational ontological category in language, a position that most other domains do not share. Among all the orientations, SHANG is the most frequently-used one. Despite of its primacy, there is little research concerning the translation of spatial metaphor SHANG in China.This thesis presents an in-depth investigation into the English translation of spatial metaphor concept SHANG by combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis and theoretical explanation with result analysis. It aims to find out metaphorical extension of SHANG and UP concepts, frequency rank of metaphorical extension, relationship between frequency rank and metaphor treatment.Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese (5th Edition) and Kangxi Dictionary Hytung Unicode Database (Revised Edition) are adopted to pin down the metaphorical extensions of SHANG while Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (6th Edition) is used to identify metaphorical extensions of UP. On the basis of this result, the study analyzes500entries of Source Chinese Text (former thirty chapters of Wu Cheng’en XIYOUJI) one by one to get the quantitative result of frequency rank of metaphorical extensions of SHANG. Meanwhile, Native English Text (500lexical entries extracted from Corpus of Contemporary American English and British National Corpus) is also analyzed to obtain frequency rank of MEs of UP. In order to better connect metaphorical extension with translation, five categories for translation treatments are summarized:translated as an expression of the same metaphor, translated into an expression of another original metaphor in source language, translated into an expression of metaphor in target language, omission and other metaphor treatments including false-translation, etc. Translated English Text is also analyzed quantitatively and quantitatively to get a general view of metaphor treatment, thereby to detect the relationship between metaphor extension and translation treatment. The major findings and contributions of this study are: (1) Metaphorical extensions proposed by Lan and Lakoff have been further extended and developed. New General Metaphorical Extension and Specific Metaphorical Extension have been identified.(2) Frequency ranks of metaphorical extensions of SHANG and UP have been identified. Although SHANG and UP owns the same cognitive domain, their metaphorical extensions differ in frequency rank.(3) Remarkable relationship between frequency rank and metaphor treatment has been confirmed. If the metaphor occupies a high rank in target language, it is more likely to be preserved in translation and its metaphorical expressions are more likely to be translated into metaphorical expressions of the same metaphor. If the metaphor is of a relatively low rank in the target language, or not shared by target language, it is less likely to be kept. It may be translated non-metaphorically or changed into a metaphor that has a higher rank in the target language.Finally, the author puts forward two suggestions for translators:firstly, since frequency plays an important role in translation, the translator should not only distinguish between cognitive domains, but also pays more attention to the frequency rank. Secondly, since corpus-based methods can present fine-grained results about frequency rank of metaphorical extension, the translator may consider adopting this methodology in researches concerning spatial metaphor translation.