Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphors In Nan Jing And Comparative Study Of Their English Translations

Nan Jing,also called Huangdi Bashiyi Nanjing,is one of the four ancient classics of traditional Chinese medicine after Huangdi Neijing.The whole book uses the pattern of questions and answers to explore the eighty-one difficult problems of traditional Chinese medical thoughts and theories,and embodies the medical level and theoretical achievements of ancient China.Throughout the book of Nan Jing,it is filled with conceptual metaphorical expressions,which fully reflects the cognition and way of thinking of human body and life from ancient Chinese medical scholars.At present,the studies of Nan Jing mainly focus on the investigation of pulse,acupuncture,or some academic thought.The relevant translation studies are mainly centering on the research of a single English translated version,and few researchers have been engaged in the English translations of Nan Jing from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.At the end of the 1980s,with the publication of the book Metaphors We Live By,the conceptual metaphor theory was first proposed,breaking through people’s inherent understanding of metaphor.Conceptual metaphor theory holds that the nature of metaphor is to use one category of things to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another.Metaphor is not only a rhetorical device,but also a way of thinking as well as a fashion of cognition.This thesis attempts to study conceptual metaphors in the original text of Nan Jing from the perspective of conceptual metaphor and compare their English translations.In this thesis,the author adopts the qualitative analysis method,taking conceptual metaphor as the research object.From the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory,the thesis analyzes the expressions of conceptual metaphor in Nan Jing and compares translations of conceptual metaphors in three English translations of Nan Jing in order to determine whether they reflect the conceptual metaphors in the original text.The innovation of this thesis lies in the innovation of the perspective of the study,including the innovation of interpreting the original text and the innovation of translation study perspective,that is,the interpretation of the original text from the perspective of conceptual metaphor,and the comparison of the corresponding translation in the tjree English versions from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.The thesis shows that:1.Nan Jing is full of conceptual metaphors,and its English translations are very helpful for western readers to understand the original text.2.There are differences between different translators in the translations of conceptual metaphors in Nan Jing,which are related to the differences in languages and cultural backgrounds produced by different countries.The research in this thesis makes readers realize that there are a lot of expressions of conceptual metaphor existing in Nan Jing and recognize that conceptual metaphor plays an important role in helping to understand traditional Chinese medical classics.The English translation of Nan Jing is conducive to promoting the culture of Chinese medicine to the world and the communication between Chinese culture and the world culture.This thesis is to analyze and compare the translation of metaphor from the new perspective of conceptual metaphor in order to provide a new way of thinking for the study of the English translation of Nan Jing.