A Study Of Translatability In The Perspective Of Grammatical Metaphor

Translation is a field full of paradoxes. The long history of translation witnesses the prolonged debates like the essence of translation, translatability vs. untranslatability, literal translation vs. liberal translation and the criteria of translation. And since the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, the issue of equivalence has been the new focus of discussion.This paper holds that the resolution of these debates calls for a more objective and convictive definition of translation. The essence of translation is to choose expressions in different languages to express the same meaning which is embodied by the field, tenor, and mode. And these three elements of context determine in turn the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings of a text which correspond with the three metafunctions of a language and form the meaning potential. It is this language potential that the actual verbal expressions are embodied by the selection of the transitivity system, mood and modality system and thematic structures. Thus translation is virtually a cross-code transmission of the meaning potential. According to Halliday's definition to grammatical metaphor (that grammatical metaphor is to use different expressions to express the same meaning), translation can be also defined as a cross-code grammatical metaphor.It often happens that in the course of such a cross-code metaphorization, what is changed is the linguistic and referential meaning of the ST about which the readers often neither have any idea nor care much. In this way, the linguistic and social-cultural non-equivalence between the source language and the target language can be eliminated through the selection of expressions that are different in "appearance" but share the same pragmatic meaning as their counterparts in the source language. This formal non-equivalence based on the equivalence in meaning provides us a brand-new approach to break the linguistic or cultural untranslatability of translation.Apart from the Introduction, the chunk of this thesis is designed into four parts (Part â…¡ to Part â…¤):Part â…¡: Relevant definitions. It is mainly a description of the three kernel definitions of this...