Cognitive Study Of Metaphor Translation In Teahouse

Metaphor is traditionally considered a rhetoric device, aiming to modify and beautify the language. In most conditions, metaphor is studied on the literary level. With the development of linguistics since last century, the study of metaphor began to attract more and more scholars'attention. Especially since the publication of Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, in which a lot of examples are cited to prove metaphor does exist in our daily language, the importance of metaphor study is becoming much more evident. As a result, more and more attention has been paid to the study of metaphor translation. But as the translation of metaphor has a very close relation with the source language and the translator's experience, the subjectivity of translators is destined to be shown in the translation.Different from traditional points, conceptual metaphor regards metaphor as a way of experiencing, thinking model and cognitive method. Mapping is a key process of conceptual metaphor in which some features are projected from the source domain to target domain, and this process is selective, uni-directional. As a conceptual phenomenon, conceptual metaphor is a construct process of mental integration, and of many mental spaces. As a cognitive theory, Relevance gives some cognitive factors in the analysis of the objects. By the use of relevance, the cognitive explanation of metaphor translation from the aspects of optimal relevance and cognitive environment is more proper.The drama Teahouse is one of the famous works of Lao She, in which there are many Beijing dialects. The mass use of metaphor in the drama is a great difficulty to translators to finish the translation, and the two famous translation versions are done by Ying Ruocheng and by Howard. In this thesis, some metaphors are selected, aiming at the cognitive analysis of metaphor translation by comparing the original metaphor and their translation versions from cognitive perspective, and to study which version is more suitable than the other from this perspective.