Difficulties Of And Strategies For Translating Conceptual Metaphors In Political News

The selected text of this translation project is from Guangming Daily’s report on “double reduction” policy.The widespread use of conceptual metaphors in the report makes abstract and obscure political concepts vivid and appealing,which is important for China’s communication with other countries and the establishment of its own discourse system.In the process of translation,the author finds that the text contains rich conceptual metaphors,which are mainly divided into structural metaphors,orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors.Due to the differences between Chinese and English,it is undoubtedly difficult to retain the feature of conceptual metaphor and reflect the cultural connotation in the translation.The difficulties in this project can be divided into three types:(1)the processing of Chinese metaphorical features;(2)the transmission of Chinese metaphorical images;(3)the connection of Chinese-English metaphorical cultural connotations.Under the guidance of relevance theory,the reporter uses three translation strategies to deal with the difficulties respectively:(1)For structural metaphors,the translation strategies of retaining and paraphrasing the source language metaphor image are adopted;(2)For orientational metaphors,the translation strategies of retaining the source language metaphor image with explanation and discarding the source language metaphor image are adopted;(3)For ontological metaphors,the translation strategies of direct source information ostension and image substitution are adopted.Through the above methods,the author tries to properly deal with the conceptual metaphors in the original text,make the translation smooth,accurate and conform to the language habits of the target language readers,and better convey the information of the original text.It has been proved that the above strategies can effectively solve the translation difficulties of conceptual metaphors in this translation project,and provide some enlightenment for the Chinese-English translation of news reports containing a large number of cultural conceptual metaphors with Chinese characteristics.