Cognitive Operations In The Translation Of Metaphor

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a figure of speech with decorative functions. Nowadays, the research on metaphor has expanded to a broader range of disciplines and become interdisciplinary, such as philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and cognitive psychology. The astounding popularity that metaphor has gained in linguistic works of the last few decades is mainly due to the fact that its study invokes many essential problems with which contemporary linguistics is concerned, such as the structure of meaning of the linguistic sign, and the complex understanding of metaphor in different texts and cultures. The new school of linguistics—cognitive linguistics, which is based on cognitive science, reveals a brand-new explanation for metaphor: metaphor does not only serve as a decoration, it is a universal phenomenon of human language and an important way of cognition as well. Generally speaking, most of our metaphorical theories were based on understanding metaphor as a figure of speech, overlooking the cognitive nature of metaphor and the close relationships with text and culture. However, the interpretation and translation of metaphor are strongly culturally and textually conditioned.Encountering these problems, this thesis tries to depict the cognitive operations and understanding of metaphor, and probe into the relationships with culture and text, then put forward three strategies for translating metaphor. The thesis is divided into four chapters:Chapter One elaborates the definition of metaphor and the basic theories about metaphor, i.e. comparison theory, substitution theory and interaction theory.Chapter Two focuses on the cognitive theories of metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory, and analyses their merits and demerits from the comparative perspective.Chapter Three introduces the cognitive operations to understand metaphor through the combination with conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory. In the later part of this chapter, emphasis is put on the discussion of cognitive functions of metaphor.Chapter Four mainly concerns the application of cognitive operations to the translation of metaphor. As a way of cognition, metaphor is a kind of cultural product and contains abundant cultural connotations. Translating metaphor in an appropriate way by spanning cultural differences and realizing the images transference can make translation vivid and expressive. According to the different cultures and texts, the author proposes three strategies for translating metaphor, i.e. M→M, M₁→M₂, and M→P, and gives some examples.