On Translation Of Metaphorical Images In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Functional Translation Theory

Literary texts often present readers with the author's ingenious figures of speech, deliberate wording and original arrangement of structure. While composing a specific style and serving certain expressive and aesthetic purposes, these sparkling features can pose great difficulty for translators due to the various linguistic points and cultural background unique to the source language they carry. As the most frequently used form of expression and rhetorical device in the history of human communication (Lakoff, Johnson, 1980:3), metaphor, one of these literary features, with its profound connection with culture often proves to be a major affliction for translators.Image takes an essential position in metaphor. It is at the very center of a two-layered structure provided by Yang Xiaorong. Understanding of the images in literary texts requires the knowledge of both layers of a given culture. If the difficulty in creating a metaphor lies in the recognition of resemblence, the difficulty in translating one is, in addition to the recognition of resemblence, the representation of the very"vehicle"—the image in the target language.Functional translation theory points out a new direction for the translation of metaphorical images. Earlier approaches to translation are more than often source-text oriented and prescriptive, while this theory is translation-oriented and relies on description and explanation of the purpose of translation. Emphasis is put on the purpose of translation, which determines the translation methods and strategies that are to be employed in order to produce a functionally adequate result.The present study aims at analyzing the translation methods employed in rendering metaphorical images in the novel Fortress Besieged from the perspective of the functional translation theory. The purpose is to find out the practical and useful ways of dealing with various metaphorical images prevailent in literary works.Wei-ch'eng and the translated text Fortress Besieged are chosen as the subject of the study since literary texts often contain more metaphors for exploration and Wei-ch'eng itself is widely acclaimed as one of the best modern fictions built upon brilliant metaphors. In addition, the translated text Fortress Besieged by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K.Mao is well received in western countries and is the only English version available so far.