A Cognitive Approach To The Translation Of Metaphors In Political Discourse

Metaphors and metaphors translation have always been attracting muchattention from scholars, who have done researches on them from differentperspectives. With the development of cognitive linguistics in recent decades, moreand more scholars try to explain metaphors as well as metaphors translation from acognitive perspective. The contemporary metaphors theory considers metaphors as amatter of human action and thought. Because politicians usually apply manymetaphors to influence people’s cognition to achieve their political purposes,metaphors in political discourse draw researchers’ attention gradually. Although thestudies of political language can be traced back to Aristotle, most of them mainlyfocus on rhetoric and pragmatic perspectives. Rare attention has been paid to thetranslation of metaphors in political discourse from the cognitive perspective.Based on the Conceptual Metaphors Theory proposed by Lakoff, this thesisundertakes a study of the conceptual metaphors applied in American presidents’speeches. After analyzing the linguistic data, we find that journey metaphors, organismmetaphors, war metaphors, family metaphors, business metaphors and religion metaphorsare frequently found in American presidents’ speeches. By analyzing the mapping processof these metaphors in the light of the Conceptual Metaphors Theory, the paper finds thatjourney metaphor, organism metaphor, war metaphor and family metaphor are appliedboth by American and Chinese politicians while business metaphor and religion metaphoronly appear in English political discourse. Based on the findings above, Newmark’s theory on metaphors translation and“Cognitive Translation Hypothesis” proposed by Mandelblit, the thesis attempts tostudy the translation of the metaphors applied in American presidents’ speeches. It isconcluded that the translation of metaphors applied in political discourse should beexamined in two scenarios: the “similar mapping condition”(SMC), which will bemet if journey metaphors, organism metaphors, war metaphors, family metaphors are used,and the “different mapping condition”(DMC), which will be met if businessmetaphors and religion metaphors are applied; if the first condition is met, literaltranslation can be adopted; if the second, adaptation and conversion of metaphors tosense will be adopted.