A Study On The Metaphors Involving Characterization In Hong Lou Meng From Cross-Cultural Perspective

Metaphor, as a distinctive part of language, is one of the cognitive models of mankind as well as a very powerful and efficient tool with which people conceptualize the world. Metaphors are produced by the common work of cognitive capacity, social culture, context and language. Thus, metaphor can not be considered in isolation but should be connected with cognition, context, social-culture and the particular interactional goals, which are all indispensable. Translation plays a key role in cross-cultural communication, and it is more cultural than linguistic, so it is accountable to discuss the translation of metaphor within the field of cross-cultural communication.Hong Lou Meng, which is well-known as the encyclopedia of Chinese culture, is abundant in metaphors, the metaphors of characterization in particular. Among all the published English versions of Hong Lou Meng, Chinese scholar Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang’s version as well as British scholar David Hawkes’version are regarded as the best two. The cases of metaphor translation in this thesis are taken from these two versions. This thesis attempts to explore some ways of metaphor translation which could be used to facilitate cross-cultural communication between English and Chinese, to analyze the metaphorical expressions of characterization in English and Chinese via a comparison between the metaphors involving characterization in different versions, which will deeper the understanding of metaphor on a cross-cultural basis.Based on previous researches, six domestication-foreignization grades of metaphor translation methods are set. Furthermore, the study first randomly selects 212 characterization metaphors from the former 80 chapters of two English versions of Hong Lou Meng, and classifies them into different groups for the convenience of this research, them the analysis of frequency and relative frequency is conducted to compare the grades of translation strategies of the selected samples. Through this, both similarities and differences between characterization in English and Chinese are examined.Findings are as follows:The fact that domestication is found dominant in both versions shows that different cultures will have different metaphors for the same concept, for experiential and cultural factors interfere with the employment of source domains for the same target concept, which may well explain the great influence cast by culture on the creation of metaphors; The translators choice of certain strategy or strategies reveals both flexibility and contingency,which tests equivalence in function should be the purpose of both cultural communication and the metaphor translation.All of these findings may shed light on research of metaphor and the translation practice as well as the study of comparative studies of English and Chinese.