Image Shift In Translating Figures Of Comparison

Figures of comparison are the most common figures of speech in literary writings. According to Webster's New World Dictionary and A Dictionary of Literary Terms, a figure of comparison is a figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of another because of the likeness between the two compared things. Generally speaking, figures of comparison have such two types as simile and metaphor. The use of figures of comparison can make the writing more vivid and more understandable. As the famous Chinese poet Ai Qing once said," Figures of comparison can make all the things including those hard to capture vivid and clear, just like the black marks in the white paper." (quoted in $^i^, 1994:20) And it is the use of images in figures of comparison that makes them charming. The image we discuss in the following thesis is a mental picture of the concrete object or an idea aroused in the readers' mind by the use of the language in figures of comparison. According to sociosemiotic approach to translation, language is a unique system of signs which have their referential meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning. And what's more, language has six functions such as informative function, expressive function, evocative function, metalingual function, esthetic function and phatic function. So the image in figures of comparison is also a sign which has its own referential meaning (the image itself) and pragmatic meaning (the associative meaning). The characteristic functions of an image are usually the esthetic function and the expressive function.When figures of comparison are translated, whether the image can be appropriately shifted decides the effect of the translation. In my opinion, Eugene A. Nida's functional equivalence is a satisfactory criterion to evaluate the effect of image shift in translation. Functional equivalence, by nature, means the translated text has the same functions as those of the original text. Therefore, the readers of atranslated text should be able to understand and appreciate it in essentially the same manner as the original readers do. If image shift is based on such a criterion, the translation would bring the target language readers the same esthetic and expressive effects. Honestly speaking, not all image shift can reach such a state. The translator may conduct image shift in three basic ways-reproducing the same image when the same image can convey the same or similar esthetic and expressive functions between the source text and the translated text; replacing the original image with a familiar target language image when the same image conveys different esthetic and expressive functions; deleting the image when the conveyance of the same image may make the translated text lengthy and difficult to understand or certain image in some idioms is endowed with specific pragmatic meaning which is totally unacceptable to the target language readers. Moreover, such an image has no corresponding image in the target language.Besides, image shift is relevant to the context. Different context can decide the choice of certain image. When translating, the translator should try to discover what actually the image is in the context and convey appropriately the image to the target language readers. And we know in Chinese and English there exist a number of phrases which seem to correspond with each other. However, in reality, such phrases can not be replaced by each other because they convey different pragmatic meanings, so the translator should try to avoid such traps in translating.In a word, image shift in the translation of figures of comparison is hard to deal with. If we can handle image shift according to Eugene A. Nida's functional equivalence, the translated text will be a good one which can bring about the closest feedback from the target language readers as that from the source language readers.