Metaphor Translation In ECST From The Perspective Of Cognition

This dissertation aims at finding out the principle and strategies of metaphor rendering in ECST (English for Common Science and Technology) from the perspective of cognition. With the development of sci-tech and the globalization, as a variety of EST(English for Science and Technology, ECST is becoming more and more important and popular.The rendering of ECST to Chinese stands as the focus in this paper, because ESCT prevails in our daily life as English is a main international language. The author gives a descriptive definition of ECST from the perspective of cognition before making a detailed exploration on features of ECST and concludes that metaphor plays a key role in ESCT, and thus to get a good rendering ESCT is to obtain a great metaphor translation. Then the author extends a thorough analysis of metaphor, and has metaphor translation based on the theory of cognition, in particular, relevance theory and the principle of optimal relevance. As a result, a cognitive framework for metaphor rendering from English to Chinese is provided. Furthermore, the strategies of metaphor rendering are naturally proposed. These are: literal translation and liberal translation. The literal translation is further developed into 7 methods: replacing the image in the source language by a standard target language image, same metaphor combined with sense, conversion of metaphor to simile retaining the image, simile plus sense, conversion of metaphor to sense, deletion, and retaining tenor. Based on these methods, the resultant omissions, additions, and alterations may indeed be justified in metaphor translation. This paper is intended to enrich the study of translation, in particular, distinctive sub- principles proposed in the study of metaphor translation from the angle of ECST which embody a far vivid feature of metaphor and plays an important role both in our economy and our life.