A Diachronic Study On English Translation Of Metaphorical Idioms In National Leaders’ Works

National leader’s work expresses the attitude of the Chinese government,and its English translation is an important channel for the international community to understand China’s major policies.Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949,the English translation of national leaders’ works has gone through three translation periods,in which there is a diachronic change in translation strategies and methods.There are lots of metaphors in national leaders’ works visualizing abstract political concepts,among which metaphorical idioms account for a large proportion and their translation is a more difficult task.In recent years,many scholars have explored the translation of metaphors in political texts,but there are few studies on the evolution of such translation,and fewer studies on the translation of metaphorical idioms.In view of such a research state,this thesis intends to make a diachronic analysis of the strategies and methods for translating metaphorical idioms in national leaders’ works in different translation periods.Under the guidance of conceptual metaphor theory and by means of the corpus tools,this study attempts to make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the strategies and methods for translating metaphorical idioms by selecting as the research data the representative national leaders’ works in the three translation periods,namely,the Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung,the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping,and Xi Jinping: The Governance of China,focusing on the metaphorical idioms as the research object.Specifically,this thesis first identifies the metaphorical idioms from the Chinese-English parallel corpus of national leaders’ works,and then summarizes and counts the translation methods employed in each work.After that,the percentages of the translation strategies of foreignization and domestication in the English translation of metaphorical idioms are calculated so as to uncover the law of evolution in the three translation periods.Finally,the major causes underlying this evolution are analyzed.The major findings of this study are as follows: Firstly,there are three methods for translating metaphorical idioms in the English translation of the national leaders’ works,that is,the preservation,replacement,and deletion of the source language(SL)vehicles.However,the frequencies of these three methods for translating the metaphorical idioms in the three works are different.In the Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung,preserving the SL vehicles is the most frequently used method,while,in the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping,the proportion of this method decreases,slightly lower than that of deleting the SL vehicles.By comparison,in Xi Jinping: The Governance of China,the proportion of deleting the SL vehicles is much higher than their preservation.Secondly,the evolution of strategies for translating metaphorical idioms in the three translation periods is from foreignization as a priority translation strategy to domestication as a dominating translation strategy.Thirdly,the causes underlying the evolution of strategies for translating metaphorical idioms in political texts include the factors of politics,culture,poetics,and target readers.This thesis attempts to diachronically explore the English translation of the national leaders’ works guided by cognitive linguistic theory and corpus tools.At the first place,this study broadens the research scope of conceptual metaphor theory and provides a new research direction for the research into metaphorical idiom translation.At the second place,it reveals the evolution of strategies for translating metaphorical idioms in national leaders’ works,shedding light on the English translation of political texts in the new era.Additionally,the analysis of the multiple underlying factors will contribute to a deeper understanding of the English translation of metaphorical idioms in the new era and it will help to improve the quality and acceptability of the translation of metaphorical idioms.