On Translating Metaphors In Fortress Besieged Into English

Metaphor, being a linguistic phenomenon, has its deep cultural meaning. Not only can it show the natural environment and historic atmosphere of a nation, but it can also convey religious belief, thinking methods, social values and conceptions and other cultural information. Besides being a linguistic phenomenon, metaphor is also an important way of thinking and behaving. Our life is flooded with metaphors, but because of different conventions, thinking methods and cultures, different nations may understand the same metaphor differently. What approaches can translators use to convey both the meanings and the cultural implications of metaphors? Traditional translation theories tend to treat metaphor translation simply as language transformation from the aspect of rhetorical study. However, metaphor can be newly illustrated in cognitive theory---it is a linguistic phenomenon, and more importantly, it is one of people's cognitive thinking methods. Cognitive Theory has created a new angle of view for translation study. Translation can be regarded as a linguistically communicative activity including double interpreting and implicating among source writer, translator and target reader. Cognitive theory helps to specify the process of psychological cognitive function of meaning conveyance in metaphor translation. This theory breaks away from the conflict between "literal translation" and "free translation" because of "equivalence" conception in traditional translation study. It provides new methods of translating for translators.Fortress Besieged is one of the greatest literature works in the 20^th century. The use of metaphor adds a lot of favors to this novel. Its English version, translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, can be called an excellent translation work, yet in it most metaphors are dealt with by literal translation. There are many advantages of literal translation, but whether the translated version can be accepted by the target readers is unknown. This essay does a study of metaphor translation from cognitive theory aspect, through a case study of metaphor translation in the English Version of Fortress Besieged, find and conclude suitable methods to translate metaphors.