On Translation Of War Metaphor In Legal Language From The Cognitive Perspective

Metaphor studies have always been a hot topic of foreign and domestic linguistics for over2000years. Traditionally, metaphor is regarded as a kind of rhetorical phenomenon which is used to decorate language. Among many theories on metaphor, the most influential ones are Aristotle’s Comparison Theory, Richards’s Interaction Theory, Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphors. In the1930s, Richards put forward Interaction Theory which firstly challenged the earlier views on metaphor. Since the1970s, with the rise of cognitive linguistics, more and more scholars began to turn their attention to this particular linguistic phenomenon. In the1980s, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson developed a cognitive turn in metaphor studies after the publishment of the masterpiece Metaphors We Live By, and they held that metaphor is a kind of thinking pattern pervading language, culture, thought and social life. More and more studies prove that human beings’ mind would be restricted without metaphor; therefore, Lakoff’s theory is gaining more and more scholars’approval.Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the research, this paper aims to analyze and to study the translation strategies on war metaphors in law discourse. The data used in this dissertation are from the famous American film Philadelphia, and23sentences are collected from the English script which involves war metaphors. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied in this dissertation to explain how people use concretes concept to comprehend legal activities, and to show the translation strategies on war metaphors in the law discourse. The dissertation shows that war metaphors exist extensively in the law discourse, and the author proposes four strategies for translating them, including reproducing the same image in target language, replacing images in source language by standard target language images, retaining the original image with explanation and omission.To sum up, the dissertation studies the translation strategies of the war metaphors in law discourse from a new angle. Analyzing the cognitive features of war metaphors in translation is a process to project the cognitive pattern from the source language of one culture to the target language of another culture; otherwise the translators cannot complete the mission of spreading specific national culture embedded in the war metaphors in the process. War metaphor is closely connected with translation, so the dissertation on war metaphor translation in legal language from the cognitive perspective is very valuable. Analyzing the translating strategies of war metaphors in English and Chinese law discourses will contribute a lot to law translation.