A Study On The Translation Of Metaphors In Six Chapters Of A Floating Life From The Perspective Of Cultural Translation

Lin Yutang is well-known across China and even the whole world for the devotion of his whole life to the transmission of the Chinese culture to the West. Six Chapters of a Floating Life is just one of his translational works. It is generally regarded as his highest achievement in translation, taking Susan Bassnett’s views of cultural translation, Lawrence Venuti’s theory of domestication and foreignization, and Andre Lefevere’s rewriting theory as the guiding theories, the thesis studies the translation of metaphors in Six Chapters of a Floating Life, analyzes the factors influencing the translator’s adoption the translation strategies and concrete techniques.The documentary research and the case studies are the two primary research methods used in the study. The author first describes the features and necessary components of a metaphors. Basing on that, the author picks out all the metaphors in Six Chapters of a Floating Life, and studies how the translator handled the vehicle and image of each metaphor to convey the cultural meaning of the metaphor so that he could fulfill his aim of disseminating Chinese culture.The study shows that when handling the cultural factors of the vehicles in the metaphors, the translator used employed five techniques. They are:1)reproducing the original image in target langage,2) retaining the original image by compensation,3) converting the Metaphor to Sense,4) replacing the image in the source language with target language image,5) borrowing. The first two techniques belong to foreignization, and the last three techniques belong to domestication. it is discovered that when he tackled the metaphors in Six Chapters of a Floating Life, Lin Yutang used both the foreignizing translation and the domesticating translation rather than relied solely on any one of the two strategies. This is due to the fact that his educational background and life experience resulted in his complicated cultural stand:a combination of two seemingly contradicting tendencies, namely, a strong attachment to Chinese culture and an unavoidable orientalism.