A Study Of Metaphor Translation Business Text: A Congnitive Approach

Modern cognitive linguistics relates metaphor to human thinking as well as behaving patterns. Metaphor means the mapping of one domain in another domain (that is to say, mapping from source domain into target domain). Metaphor expressions demonstrate mappings among different concepts. This study collected 20 business reports and business news mainly from The Economist, Business Week and Harvard Business Week. After identifying metaphors in source articles, the author applied both the quantitative and qualitative analysis to carry out a detailed research on the metaphor system in target works. Then the author, based on some commonly used translation strategies in translating literary works, found out that the similar strategies could also be used in dealing with business text. Then the author analyzed translation methods from the perspective of source domain mapping in target domain.This research focused on metaphor translation from cognitive perspective and applied theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson in concrete metaphor translation in business context.The author classified metaphor translation into several stages; firstly, the translator needs to identify metaphors at sentential level. The author then pointed out the three features of recognizing metaphors. After positioning the metaphor, the translator should adopt different translation strategies in accordance with the three conditions: equivalent mapping, deviated mapping and note-adding...