A Study Of Chinese And English Death Metaphors And The Translation Of Chinese Death Metaphors Into English

Metaphor study, which can be traced back to Aristotle, has been the interest of linguists and rhetoricians for more than 2000 years. According to the views on whether metaphor is a matter of language or a matter of thought, metaphor studies fall into two general types: the traditional theories and the contemporary theory of metaphor. The traditional views of metaphor hold that metaphor is just a property of words; it is a linguistic phenomenon used for some artistic and rhetorical purpose. The contemporary theory of metaphor, which was first developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980 in their book Metaphors We Live By, challenges all the aspects of the traditional views by claiming that metaphor is a property of concepts rather than words; the function of it is to better understand certain concepts, and not just to achieve some artistic or aesthetic purposes. The study of the contemporary theory has been mainly undertaken within the scope of English although there are some scholars who have applied this new theory to other languages. This paper just aims to make a comparative study of Chinese and English death metaphors to see whether the Chinese conceptual system of death is similar to that of English. Based on this comparative study, certain translation strategies are proposed for the translation of Chinese death metaphors into English.The whole paper is divided into five chapters with the first chapter giving a general review of metaphor studies as well as the studies of metaphor translation.The second chapter makes a general introduction of the contemporary theory of metaphor by drawing a comparison between the traditional views and the contemporary views. According to the contemporary theory, metaphor is a set of mappings across two conceptual domains, namely, the source domain and the target domain. Each mapping process is partial as it provides the understanding of the target domain just from one respect. But together with the other metaphors theyform a huge system which constructs the human being's conceptual system. Based on this definition, the distinction between conceptual metaphor and metaphorical expressions is made and the relations between poetic metaphors and the conventional metaphors are discussed. At last this chapter introduces the experiential basis of metaphor for the discussion of the cultural universality and variation.The third chapter attempts to make a comparative study of Chinese and English death metaphors to see whether Chinese conceptual system of death is similar to that of English. The study demonstrates that most of the Chinese conceptual metaphors for death are similar to those in English although there are some differences at the specific level of the elaborations of the mapping process. It also shows that some conceptual metaphors are unique to Chinese as they are rich and colorful in culture. The result of the study proves that there are cultural universality as well as cultural variation between Chinese and English death metaphors. Cultural universality enables the translator to render Chinese death metaphors under the similar mapping condition while cultural variation sets the different mapping condition for the translation of death metaphors from Chinese into English.The fourth chapter discusses the specific translation strategies in the light of the similar mapping condition and the different mapping condition. The research shows that under the similar mapping condition, there are four strategies for the translator to choose, they are: (i) employing same conceptual metaphors with equivalent expressions; (ii) employing same conceptual metaphor with different expressions; (iii) using different conceptual metaphors; (iv) using non-metaphorical expressions. But in terms of the different mapping condition, the translator is mainly confined to the strategies of using either different conceptual metaphors or non-metaphorical expressions.The last chapter concludes that the contemporary theory of metaphor is workable in Chinese as in English as Chinese conc...