English Translation Of Emotion Metaphors In Lu Xun’s Novels:A Cognitive Construal Approach

Emotion is abstract in nature and is conceptualized primarily depending on metaphors.Emotion metaphors based on embodied and cultural experience universal to human beings share tremendous similarities and differences across difference languages,and at the same time,translators with various social background and encyclopedic knowledge have different cognitive abilities.Under the guidance of cognitive linguistics,making reasonable inference about the thinking patterns of different translators in the process of translation could better unveil the cognitive strategies adopted by them and increase our knowledge about their cognitive styles.Lu Xun’s works featured by abundant emotions and vivid characterization offers abundant materials for the studies on translation of emotion metaphors.Up to date,only a handful of studies have been conducted from the perspective of cognitive linguistics to make inference about the translation process of literary works in a systematic and comprehensive way.Based on cognitive construal,this study explores the distributions and the underlying cognitive mechanisms of emotion metaphors in Lu Xun’s novels,and investigates the cognitive preferences of different translators by virtue of the parallel corpus established with Lu Xun’s works and their translations by the Yangs and Julia Lovell.This study has four major findings:(1)There are seven major categories of emotion metaphors in Lu Xun’s works and their translations,including metaphors of anger,anxiety,embarrassment & shy,fear,happiness,sadness and surprise & strangeness.Among all the emotion metaphors,fear and happiness metaphors account for the largest proportion,which is followed by anger,embarrassment/shyness and sadness metaphors.These emotion metaphors are closely associated with the themes of Lu Xun’s works,and greatly contribute to the characterization of the novel;(2)The number of emotion metaphors of different categories in the two translations is obviously larger than that in the original text,and the most salient differences could be found in the metaphors concerning anger,fear and sadness.This speaks volume for the fact that creative additions have been made in the process of translating emotion metaphors in Lu Xun’s works.The original text may sometimes straightforward describe emotions with abstract words,while the two translations have the tendency to conceptualize them with metaphorical expressions;(3)Either in the original text or in the translation texts,emotion metaphors conceptualize the abstract emotions by virtue of the universally shared physical experience of human beings or their cognition of the physical world.Nevertheless,modifications would occasionally occur when linguistic conventions exert constraint on the linguistic representations in the target language,or when translators make active changes to fulfill certain contextual effects by mobilizing various dimensions of cognitive construal;(4)As to the cognitive preferences manifested in the two translations of Lu Xun’s works,the Yangs are more inclined to employ specificity when representing emotion metaphors and primarily reduplicate or modify emotion metaphors in the original text,and the translation by the Yangs is characterized by a higher degree of subjectivity and takes on an obedient fashion to some extent,while Lovell may sometimes adopt schematicity to omit some details and show more initiatives to resort to conceptual metaphors as she reproduces abstract emotions which are straightforward expressed in the original text,and her translation has a higher degree of objectivity.This study unveils the cognitive mechanism underlying emotion metaphors in the source text and target texts of Lu Xun’s works from the perspective of construal,which not only substantiates the mighty explanatory power of the construal theory,but also extends our knowledge about the cognitive preferences of English translators of Lu Xun’s works.Besides,the present study provides implications for the practice of literary translation by seeking for the possibility of working out creative expressions when dealing with emotion metaphors.