Metaphors In Hamlet And Their Translation From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Metaphor is not only a rhetorical device, but also a cognitive style. In Hamlet, metaphor is not only a linguistic charm of the play, but the performance of its unique creative thinking. This thesis will discuss the linguistic art in Hamlet from a metaphorical perspective.By now, many scholars at home did not draw much attention to the translation study of metaphors in Hamlet as they did it from the perspective of language and culture. In existing Chinese translations, there are a lot of problems on the metaphorical translations. Based on the research status above, this thesis applies the conceptual metaphor theory to analyze and discuss the metaphor rhetorical device and its translation in Hamlet. After doing many multi-angle, multi-level, large-scale researches, scholars who are engaged in the study of Shakespeare, discover that the conceptual metaphor has a more and more important effect on people’s cognitive activities and social activities. Since Hamlet has been translated into Chinese, researchers conducted plenty of translation study from different perspectives. Conceptual metaphor becomes more and more popular during these perspectives, and also provides a new perspective for Hamlet study.This thesis chooses Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, as the linguistic data, mainly because, as the pinnacle of Shakespearean play, Hamlet has been got most attention and analyses when it came out, but many scholars mainly studied it from the perspective of literature, few of them did it from cognition and metaphor. On the basis of cognitive metaphor theory, the classification of metaphor and the summarization of its metaphoric functions are done.By combining the translations of Tian Han, Liang Shiqiu, Zhu Shenghao, Bian Zhilin and Fang Ping, this thesis applies conceptual metaphor theory to analyze the metaphor rhetorical device and its translation in Hamlet, and draws a conclusion of the main translating methods used in the current translation versions and the problems remained. On this basis, the cognitive metaphor theory is applied to discuss and analyze the translating process in Hamlet and three key transiting strategies----quivalent mapping translation, equivalent deviating translation and metaphor omitting translation strategies are proposed; and to utilize these three translating strategies to guide the translation of metaphors in Hamlet.