A Study On Strategies For Translating Metaphor Of English Public Speech Into Chinese

Public speech is regarded as a special variety between the oral and the written styles. Currently, metaphor translation within this range is still a less discussed area. Therefore, this paper extends a systematic study on strategies for translating metaphor of English public speech into Chinese.This paper is divided into five chapters.Chapter One indicates the purpose and the significance of this paper.Chapter Two generalizes the history, the definition, the classification, the characteristics of public speech and its pertinent researches. According to different purposes, public speech can be classified into the informative, the persuasive and those on special occasions. Its basic features are symbolic, ephemeral, fixed and it has the characteristics of both the oral and the written styles.Chapter Three discusses in detail on the definition, the features and the classification of metaphor, summarizes the studies on metaphor and its translation in the West and in China. The primary characteristics of metaphor are ubiquitous, conceptual and systematic. Metaphor can be classified from the semantic level or according to the degree of its convention. The four influential metaphor theories in the West are known as the comparison theory, the substitution theory, the interaction theory and the cognition theory.The dynamic equivalence theory of Nida, the semantic translation proposition of Newmark, the rhetoric translation results of Feng Qinghua and the strategies for translating proverbs and other symbolic expressions of Zheng Shengtao all provide theoretical foundations for the study on strategies for translating metaphor of English public speech into Chinese from respective perspectives.On the basis of the previous studies on metaphor, Chapter Four puts forward two basic approaches and seven strategies for translating metaphor of English public speech into Chinese. The two approaches are to maintain the source image and to sacrifice the source image.The source image maintaining approach covers five corresponding strategies: 1) the metaphor to metaphor strategy; 2) the metaphor to simile strategy; 3) the metaphor plus paraphrase strategy; 4) the simile plus paraphrase strategy; 5) the annotation strategy.The source image sacrificing approach includes two translation strategies: 1) the image substitution strategy; 2) the paraphrase strategy.Chapter Five is the conclusion part of this paper, generalizing the key points of this study and proposing some recommendations for the relevant researches in future.