English Conceptual Metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS: A Cognitive Analysis And Its Chinese Translation

The contemporary Cognitive Linguistics demonstrates that both human conceptual system and its linguistic expressions are metaphorical. According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), put forward by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), metaphor is pervasive in everyday language and thought; it is a cognitive activity in which people understand one experience in the target domain in terms of another in the source domain via mapping from the source domain to the target domain. The Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT), which is regarded as a further development of CMT, aims to explore the meaning construction, especially the on-line meaning construction;.it takes mental spaces as the basic units and builds four abstract spaces:generic space, input spaceâ… , input spaceâ…¡and blending space, which form the network model of conceptual integration (Fauconnier & Turner 2002).Due to their abundant attributes and delicate relations with human beings, animals are widely used to form conceptual metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS. Generally speaking, this is a qualitative study. It presents the readers the cognitive operations of English conceptual metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS and the cognitive process of metaphor translation, and comes up with corresponding cognitive translation strategies. All of these are done with detailed qualitative analysis.This thesis first establishes a corpus by choosing certain examples under the conceptual metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS from the Cambridge Dictionaries Online and Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary and then conducts a detailed cognitive analysis of the corpus in terms of CMT to ensure a better and more accurate understanding on the part of the readers and effective translation as well, since the accurate understanding of the content is the key to a successful translation.Translation has always been a hard nut to crack; and metaphor translation, due to its complex nature, proves to be a bigger challenge to the translators. With the cognitive turn in metaphor studies, we get a full understanding of the natural relationship between conceptual metaphor and metaphorical expressions, which provide new insights for the translation of metaphors from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective. Scholars at home and abroad have spared no effort to study metaphor translation from different perspectives and put forward various translation strategies. Based on the previous studies, this thesis comes up with a network model of conceptual integration for metaphor translation in terms of the network model of conceptual integration from CIT; and in terms of the mappings occurring in translation, four translation strategies are produced for the E-C translation of the conceptual metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS:transplanting mappings, substituting mappings, deleting mappings and supplementing mappings.