A Study On Translation Of Tropes In Huangdi Neijing From The Perspective Of The Meaning Theory Of Semiotics

The trope refers to a rhetorical device that uses one thing to express another by similarities between two things, which can transform alienation into familiarity, profundity into plainness and make language imaginative and attractive. Under the influences of ancient philosophical ideas and culture, tropes are extremely widespread in Chinese medical classics, especially TCM fundamental book Huangdi Neijing where only tropes include four kinds, namely simile, metaphor, metonymy and logical metaphor. The appropriate application of the trope not only makes language vivid and life-like, but also fully embodies TCM cultural unique style "compatibility of medicine and culture".The meaning theory of semiotics makes translation studies across specific linguistic studies and joins in the category of cross-cultural studies, which provides a tridimensional research method for translation. Charles William Morris separates symbols into three systems:syntactic, semantic and pragmatic, to which the corresponding semiotic relationships are respectively linguistic meaning, referential meaning and pragmatic meaning. His trichotomy on semiotics completely reflects the relationships between meanings and has crucial guiding significance for practical translation.In this study, the tropes in Huangdi Neijing are mainly analyzed by following methods:1. retrieving the sentences with tropes and their corresponding translations in previous34chapters by hand;2. establishing miniature bilingual parallel corpus for tropes in person;3. contrasting and analyzing the readability of both versions;4. analyzing the translation strategies of tropes, using the meaning theory of semiotics to expound the translation of sentences with tropes and mentioning corresponding translation strategies.By contrasting and analyzing English translation of tropes in both versions, the author finds that both translators mainly adopt simile-simile, simile-metaphor, metaphor-metaphor, and omitting and reduction methods. Besides, mistranslation is also involved. According to the meaning theory of semiotics, the author believes that when translating the sentence with tropes, the translator should conform to the following principles:combining the context and word pairs to accurately grasp referential meaning; selecting words flexibly, adjusting sentence elements or change their structures to maintain linguistic meaning to the greatest extent; adopting various compensatory strategies to compensate the absence of original culture and exactly express pragmatic meaning to recur the original meaning.The meaning theory of semiotics is conductive to the meaning expression and recurrence, capable of constructing a relatively systemic recurrent mode of symbol meaning for Chinese medical classics. This study researches the tropes in Huangdi Neijing on three levels of referential meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning in the hope of accurately grasping the relationships among them to search an appropriate meaning-recurred theoretical mode for classic translation.