Business Metaphor And Its Translation: A Conceptual Integration Perspective

This thesis attempts a systematic analysis of business metaphors in Chinese and English. Moreover, it has explored the ways of translating these metaphors.The research finds that, Chinese and English are different in metaphorically expressing business states or management affairs. However, they are quite similar in metaphorically stating business competition or its development tendency.In this thesis, metaphor translation is imported into conceptual integration network, which suggests that the former is the conceptual integration of two input spaces (STS and TRS) with the mapping from generic space in blended space (TTS). Generic space is an abstract structure made up of similarities between STS and TRS which result from integration, therefore, the generic space maps onto both inputs throughout the whole process of translation to guarantee the cross-space mappings and projections. This thesis points out that conceptual structure conveyed by source text connects both inputs. Organized by frames or concepts, conceptual structure is usually reflected by certain cognitive connections. Translator should recognize such structure, and set up the generic space.In terms of similarity and difference of metaphorical mappings from source domain to target domain in Chinese and English, metaphor translation can be classified into three types: similar mapping from source domain to target domain; mapping from different source domains to the same target domain; mappings being absent in one language might be present in the another language. For type one, the shared cognitive connection is projected into blended space, and the metaphorical expressions are translated into correspondent expressions in target language. For type two, the original cognitive connection is replaced by a new one to represent the same conceptual structure, or the original conceptual structure is directly projected into the blended space to get integrated. For type three, a new cognitive connection is set up in TRS.The research discussed in this thesis is conducive to a systematic observation of metaphor formation in a cross-linguistic viewpoint; moreover, the study of business metaphor translation in a conceptual integration perspective provides a new approach to metaphor translation.