A Cognitive Approach To Lexical Meaning Shifts In C-E Translation

Researches on translation shift have been conducted for long. Mostly carried out throughtext comparison, the previous studies collect translation shift phenomena and divide them intocategories. These tentative researches also give explanations to shifts, and deem that they aremainly caused by the incompatibility of language systems or the subjectivity of the translator.Translation meaning shift, as a kind of translation shift on the micro level, has gone through thisresearch. Although relatively young, cognitive linguistics has been developed into a widelyaccepted subject, in which conceptual metonymy is an important and influential researchdestination. The essence and classification of conceptual metonymy have been illuminated. Inrecent years, many researchers have been applying cognitive linguistics to translation study andhave come up with new results in translation study.Despite the translation shift researches done, a specific investigation into translationmeaning shift hasn’t been conducted in a systematic or scientific way. Since conceptualmetonymy, a more mature system, is based on the transferability of cognition, it is supposed toprovide the research of meaning shift with a new perspective. This thesis, based on Radden andK vecses’ theory on metonymy’s definition and classification and applying a combined methodof quantitative and qualitative researches, devotes itself to the lexical meaning shifts in C-Etranslation. It aims at revealing the essence and pattern of lexical meaning shifts and inducinguseful translation strategies.With the third chapter of Weicheng as the corpus, the research is conducted by identifyingthe lexical meaning shifts in the translation, and further identifying if the shifts are metonymicshifts at first. Then the metonymic meaning shifts are classified into models. The proportion ofeach kind of meaning shift is computed and also explained. Based on the statistics and exampleslisted, the findings are made as follows: firstly, most lexical meaning shifts in C-E translation aremetonymic; secondly, a great portion of the metonymic meaning shifts can be classified into themodels of metonymy proposed by Radden and K vecses; thirdly, in the frequently activated andhighly developed ICMs, translation meaning shifts are more likely to take place. Based on thesefindings, the research proposes that metonymic meaning shift should be applied as a means oftranslation.