A Study On English Translation Of The Metaphors In The Book Of Poetry In The Light Of Palmer's Cultural Linguistics

Translation is not only a process of language transformation, but also involves the exchange of cultural information between two languges. Therefore, the cultural factor in translation has been paid more and more attention. Because of this, metaphor translation becomes relative complicated issue in translation. In the view of traditional linguistics and studies of translation, metaphor is regarded as the rhetorical device in literature, and yet, for cognitive linguistics, metaphor is an important cognitive instrument of the human beings more than a means of figure of speech. On the basis of cognitive linguistics, Palmer's cultural linguistics adds the cultural factor into study and constructs an image-schema theory. It further investigates many linguistic phenomena through analyzing the relationship between culture and cognitive models, especially metaphor, and provides a new perspective for the study of metaphor.The Book of Poetry,the essence of Chinese culture, is known as large numbers of metaphors which makes its translation be the favour of both Chinese and Western scholars. However, Chinese scholar Xia Chuancai(1985) do not think that Western scholars' English versions of Chinese classics are pretty good in that Western scholars lack of first-hand Chinese cultural experience, and cannot really comprehend the history origin and spiritual essence of Chinese culture. Thus, Chinese classics had better be translated by those Chinese scholars who have a good command of Chinese and Western cultures, such as senior translators Xu Yuanchong and Wang Rongpei. During the 1990s, with cross-cultural communications deepening, Chinese scholars take the historical responsibility of spreading Chinese traditional culture throughout the world.In this research, the metaphors in The Book of Poetry are extracted as the selected corpus. After the comparative analysis of the two English versions of The Book of Poetry, one is translated by Xu Yuanchong, the other is by Wang Rongpei, this research attempts to study English translation of metaphor from the perspective of Palmer's cultural linguistics and tries to put forward a new method in translating The Book of Poetry.