On Metaphor Translation In Chinese Literary Works From Cross-cultural Perspective

Metaphor has been studied for more than two thousand years. The traditional metaphor study is confined to the field of rhetoric, in which metaphor is considered a figure of speech. The development of cognitive linguistics deepens understanding of metaphor. In their book Metaphors We Live By, whose publication symbolizes the beginning of metaphor study in the cognitive angle, Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphor is actually omnipresent:metaphor is "pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action". Furthermore, metaphor interacts with culture. While culture shapes metaphor, metaphor constitutes culture, and metaphor is the external representation of culture. For this reason, different cultures have different metaphors for the same concept, as experiential and cultural factors interfere with the employment of metaphor in source domain and target domain. On the other hand, similar experiences give rise to identical metaphors. However, not all metaphors can be fully understood by people from other countries, thus translation of metaphor is of great significance.Chinese literary works, as a part of culture treasure, are full of metaphors. This thesis discusses examples of metaphors employed by Qian Zhongshu in his Fortress Besieged, and intends to study translation of these metaphors from the cross-cultural perspective so as to arouse the readers'interests in and attention to metaphors.Through analyzing the metaphors and its translation in Fortress Besieged, and discussing the two cultural strategies in metaphor translation:foreignization and domestication, the thesis raises specific strategies of metaphor translation in Chinese literary works, that is:reproducing the original image in the target language, retaining the original image by compensation, converting the metaphor into simile, converting the metaphor to sense, replacing the image in the source language with target language, ignorance of metaphor in source language. In short, they are:"preserving", "converting", and "abandoning".