A Study Of Metaphor And Metaphor Translation In Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone: A Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

The study of metaphor has gone through two thousand years. Traditional metaphor study was only confined to the field of rhetoric,in which metaphors were considered as decorative and additional part of the language, and a kind of abnormal use of language. Metaphors have not been given due attention.With change of western philosophy, people's understanding of metaphor deepened. In the book Metaphors We Lived By written by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the writer mentioned that metaphor is ubiquitous. The publication of this book symbolized the beginning of metaphor study in cognitive way. In the eyes of the researchers, a metaphor"is no longer just a linguistic phenomenon, more importantly, it is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action."People from different cultural backgrounds use metaphors frequently in communication, and therefore the translation of metaphors becomes particularly important.Functional Equivalence has brought great changes to Chinese translation since it was introduced. Dynamic Equivalence changed the traditional Chinese criteria of Yanfu's"faithfulness","smoothness" and "elegance" as standard. The kernel view of Functional Equivalence Theory is to achieve the maximum level of equivalence, or a minimum level one in terms of style and reader's response to the source language. Compared with translation theory put forward before, Functional Equivalence Theory specifies that translation is within the area of linguistics and at the same time, it brings culture and reader's response under serious attention of translation studies. Functional Equivalence Theory is based on the equivalence of meaning and style and it emphasizes that the receptors should respond to the target language message with substantially the same manner to the source language as the receptors do to the original. Readers'response is the criterion that evaluates the quality of translations. This thesis explores the metaphors'translation in Su Nong's version and Peng Qianwen's version separately. They did their best to achieve the highest level of dynamic and functional equivalence while at the same time tried to make up for the disadvantages of it by form correspondence. The two translations testify the guiding role of Functional Equivalence on metaphor and also prove the applicability of Functional Equivalence in practice.