A Study Of The Translation Of Common Body Metaphor From The Angle Of Peter Newmark's Text Category Theory

Human body metaphor is a significant cognitive style of people understanding the world. People almost map all parts of their body into the objective material world in all forms and know the world by the mode of human body's metaphorization. The establishment of conceptual metaphor bases on the human body experiences. Therefore, the body plays an extreme important role in the development of human acknowledges."Conceptual metaphor"proposed by Lakoff and Johnson expands the researching extend of metaphor from the angle of cognition. The theory states that it is not only a language phenomenon, at the same time is more likely a circumstance of recognization, great method of human thought and a tool for us to know and understand the world better. There are a lot of similar body metaphors both in Chinese and English, which owe to the same psychological and physical experience that belongs to human body experience, in another word—the universality of cognition. At the same time, they also show some differences in some aspects, which because of the existence of culture factor. Newmark's text category theory is right to provide a nice method for the translation of such materials. His theory divides the text into three types on the basis of its functions, translating different texts with different approaches, which opened up a new train of thought for us treating the translation problems. And his supplements and completion to the translation theory also have a strong enlightenment and directive significance to modern translation theory and translation practice.Up till now, many experts have studied the body metaphor and the text category translation and they have achieved a lot. Yet most of the studies are only relating to single one of them and they seldom do the research by unifying the two. It is believed those mentioned above are of the same importance for Chinese translation and Western translation. So this topic is chosen for the research. This thesis attempts to offer a few commonplace remarks by way of introduction to translation of body metaphors so that others may come up with valuable opinions for this topic. By translation, Chinese people can communicate with Western people, so they can improve themselves and develop their country. This thesis, divided into five parts, deals with the following issues.Chapter One is introduction.Chapter Two introduces the nucleus-theory of this thesis: Peter Newmark's text category theory at first and semantic translation secondly, communicative translation thirdly. Besides, it also introduces some interrelating concepts about metaphor also.Chapter Three states the description of body metaphors and the close relationship between body metaphors, culture and translation.Chapter Four combines theories with practices. It discusses the effective methods for translating body metaphors based on Newmark's text category method, semantic translation and communicative translation. It also proposes that semantic translation, communicative translation and a combination of the two are the effective methods for translating body metaphors.Chapter Five is conclusion.