Translation Of The Metaphors In Song Ci-Poems

Metaphor, as a pervasive language phenomenon, has always been studied by scholars including not only the rhetoricians but also linguists, philosophers, psychologists and cognitive linguists. And the research on metaphor has shifted from pure rhetoric to other disciplines, which extends the metaphor study to a broader field. In1986, Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson proposed Relevance Theory in their Relevance: Communication and Cognition. This theory provides a new perspective to study metaphor while interpreting communication and cognition. According to Relevance Theory, metaphor is a kind of "loose talk", it is just an ordinary utterance which requires no special interpretive abilities or procedures but demands extra processing effort. Like the interpretation of other utterances, its understanding is constrained by the presupposition of mutual manifestness and the pursuit of optimal relevance. Metaphor, as a natural outcome of some very general cognitive and inferential abilities in verbal communication, can be well explained under Relevance Theory. The explanation of Relevance Theory for metaphor develops the former metaphorical theories and further points out that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but more important, it is a way of thinking, which can help us understand the world in a better way.Gutt, a German scholar, first applied Relevance Theory to translation. Within the framework of his Relevance Translation Theory, translation is viewed as interlingual interpretive use across language boundaries and aims at optimal relevance in relative respects. In other words, with the current context and knowledge one has possessed, the hearer can get enough contextual effects through proper processing effort. Gutt also put forward two approaches for translation:direct translation and indirect translation. Direct translation can preserve the communicative clues provided by the original linguistic properties to guide the audience to the interpretation of the communicator’s intention. It purports to interpretively resemble the original completely in the context envisaged for the original. Indirect translation aims to retain the original cognitive effect or basic meaning rather than the original linguistic properties. Direct translation and indirect translation both are interlingual interpretive use. They form a continuum among which indirect translation covers most and direct translation only picks out the limiting case.Song Ci-Poems, which contain large numbers of metaphors, are the gem of the Chinese language and crystallization of the Chinese culture. Metaphors in the case study are selected from Song Ci-Poems. After a detailed analysis of the translations of metaphors in the target text, their quality is commented, their inadequacy is pointed out and some suggestions are offered. According to the research, adopting indirect translation as the major means to deal with the translation of metaphors in Song Ci-Poems, the translator expects the target readers to obtain adequate cognitive effect of the original after some processing effort by themselves. During the pursuit of optimal relevance in translation, dynamic context plays a key part. But due to linguistic and cultural differences total optimal relevance is, in some cases, impossible.