On Metaphor Translation From A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

The study of metaphor has a long history of more than two thousand years.Traditionally the research on metaphor is generally limited to rhetoric and metaphor wasconsidered as an ornamentation of language. The study of metaphor didn’t expand to awider field of disciplines and become interdisciplinary until1970s. One of the mostincomparable contributions of cognitive linguistics to metaphor researches lies in that itfigures out metaphor is not just a rhetoric device, what’s more important it is anindispensable tool for people to perceive the world. From the view of cognitivelinguistics, the definition of metaphor is that perceiving one conceptual domain in termsof another, a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system. The study of metaphorshould not be confined to rhetoric function but it serves as a way to help peopleunderstand the cognitive mechanism of human beings. The new approach of cognitivelinguistics towards metaphor has focused on the cognitive nature of metaphor. Withregard to translation, cognitive linguistics theory provides the study of metaphortranslation a brand-new angle and a theoretic base. As a result, it has inevitably affectedthe metaphor translation research.This thesis mainly is based on Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory(CM) from the cognitive linguistics perspective, the center to which is mapping from asource domain to a target domain and at the same time by comparing metaphors inChinese and English digging how metaphors reflect different cultural elements. Theexperience of human beings is the base of conceptual metaphor and thanks to the sameexperience and physical reaction, there are the same conceptual metaphors existing inboth Chinese and English, which is a great convenience for people in different countriesto understand each other and communicate. On the other hand, there are differences inconceptual metaphors in Chinese and English on account of discrepancies betweendifferent cultures. Some conceptual metaphors exist in one language but lack in theother and some conceptual metaphors have different degrees of typicality between theselanguages which lead to translation difficulties and require translators to make adjustments.The comparative study between English and Chinese has gone through tremendousprogress in China．However, researches within the framework of contemporary theoryof metaphor are rare, especially those aiming at revealing the translation strategies ofcross-cultural metaphors. Since metaphor plays such an important role in the waypeople conceptualize the world and in the understanding of abstract domains as will beshown in the research part, successful translation can not only provide us a deep insightinto people’s way of thinking and value system, but enrich our own languagesystem．The thesis first probes theories on metaphor study, then narrows down to Lakoffand Johnson’s cognitive approach. Finally, based on the review of theories, the authortentatively suggests several strategies on the transfer of metaphorical expressions acrosslanguages. Generally speaking, cognition is the foundation of forming metaphor whichis the common core of all expressions in human languages, so it is obviously unwise toanalyze metaphor without studying cognition.