The Cognitive Process Of Translation In Blending Networks

The traditional rhetoricians viewed metaphor as decorative in nature and independent of human cognition. Modern cognitive linguistics holds that metaphor is one of the basic ways of cognition and language can reflect the conceptual system of people. Metaphor refers to not only the metaphorical expressions but the way of thought and behave -conceptual metaphor.On the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the present study carries on a systematic analysis of metaphors in business discourses to seek out their systematicity and the metaphorical nature of business activities. The present study will also import the metaphorical concept to the metaphor translation and situate translation in the overall network of conceptual integration by adopting the perspective of cognitive structures.In this study a large number of metaphorical expressions are collected in the sampled articles selected from Business Week, and classified in accordance with their source domains. By analyzing the linguistic expressions and their source domains in business discourses, the study shows that metaphor is based on the bodily experience of human beings, and it is one of the important mechanisms utilized to reason about the abstract business concepts.In addition, the present study proposes that establishing the conceptualization on which a particular metaphorical expression is based is relevant to metaphor translation. On the basis of Blending Theory, the cognitive process of metaphor translation is regarded as a process of blending among multi-spaces, i.e., a conceptual intergration process of the two input spaces in the blended space under the constraints of the generic space. Source text with its schema and target schema are viewed as the two input spaces that are mapped onto the blended space in which an emergent structure arises to produce the...