| The publication of Metaphor We Live By (1980) broke through the rhetorical limitation of metaphor study. In the book, Lakoff and Johnson used the knowledge of cognitive linguistics to study metaphor and proposed the theory of conceptual metaphor. They believed that the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. Metaphor is a way to understand and express the universal experience. In other words, metaphor is not only a way of traditional rhetoric but a way of thinking, experience and behavior.In the book, Lakoff and Johnson used amounts of examples to prove that the metaphor is not generated randomly, but is based on our bodily experience and the basic life experience towards ourselves and the world. Emotions are one of the basic and most important life experiences. Therefore, emotion study is one part of cognitive study. Emotion metaphor is dated back to Lakoff and Johnson in1980. Later on, Kovecses(1986,1988,1990,1996,2000,2002), Matsuki(1995) and Ning Yu(1998) and other scholars made great contributions to the study of English emotion metaphors and contrastive studies between English and other languages. Koveceses (1990) divided emotions into anger, fear, happiness, sadness, love, desire, pride, shame and surprise. He searched the universalities and variations behind the categorizations and mappings.As one of the basic human emotions love always gains attentions from poets and writers who produce various love metaphors. Love metaphor study draws attentions of scholars at home and abroad and yields rich fruits. As one of the most prominent ones, Kovecsees systematically categorized love metaphors in his book Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love (1986). And he further confirmed his love metaphor system in his later published books The Language of Love (1988) and Emotion Concepts (1996). However, we have observed that love metaphor study is mainly based on the corpora to either do the categorization of one language or make contrastive studies between different languages. The study field is too narrow.Shakespearean plays are a diamond on the crown of literature. The language of Shakespeare is rich and varied. His works provide us a magnificent ground to explore the categories of metaphor. Nevertheless, seldom scholars at home and abroad did use conceptual metaphor theory to study the metaphors in the Shakespearean works. This situation makes this thesis innovative.After the introduction of Shakespearean works, translators devote themselves to render these plays, among whom Liang Shiqiu, Zhu Shenghao and Fang Ping are the most outstanding ones. This thesis chooses the versions of Zhu Shenghao and Fang Ping, because Zhu’s version is widely recognizable and has great influence. Fang’s version represents the latest fruits of Shakespearean translation studies. The two versions are endowed with their time features and show the development of translation of Shakespearean works.This thesis uses the four Shakespearean comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado About Nothing) and the Zhu’s version and Fang’s version as data. With the methods of qualitative and quantitative studies, the thesis collects176sentences containing love metaphors and analyzes the20categorizations of love metaphors from the source text,23categorizations from Zhu’s version and22from Fang’s version. After the contrastive study between the two languages, the thesis finds out that11categorizations are universal in both languages,7are partially universal and the rest are the respectively distinct features in the two languages. It is proved by the universalities that metaphors are based on our universal bodily experience. The variations show that the two languages are harmony with diversity under the factors of living environments, religious beliefs and different ethnics and philosophies.The other task of the thesis is to explore the different translation strategies adopted by the two translators. Zhu’s translation strategies are deletion, literal translation, free translation, conversion, literal translation plus explanation and literal translation plus replacement. Fang’s version employs the strategies of literal translation, free translation, conversion, literal translation plus explanation, literal translation plus footnote and literal translation plus replacement. With a comparative study, the thesis discovers that except that deletion and literal translation plus footnote are the respectively unique translation strategies in the two versions, the rest of translation strategies remain the same in the two versions. That does not mean that the process of translation of Shakespearean works sticks in the mud. For the statistics collected from the strategy analyses, literal translation and free translation are the first choices for both the translators. The numbers show the differences that in Zhu’s version literal translation occupies121, while103in Fang’s version. For the free translation, Zhu’s version has27, while Fang’s version31. The distribution of two translation strategies in the two versions emphasizes that the Shakespearean works are widely spread in all ways and more and more people accept the Shakespearean works and the western culture. Some linguistic expressions do not need to be introduced as imports. They have been already assimilated with the Chinese culture. Under the influence of overall considerations, translator’s preference, time and translation purpose, the two translators adopt different strategies to translate even the same sentence.The whole thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One serves as an introductory part. It presents the research purpose, research questions and research significance of the thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review. It mainly consists of five parts:the first part is the review of cognitive linguistics, the second part is the review of metaphor, the third part is the review of emotion metaphor, the fourth part is the review of love metaphor and the last one is about the metaphor translation.Chapter Three is the research data and methodology.Chapter Four is the main body of this thesis which consists of three parts. The first part is the analysis of love metaphors in the four comedies. The second part is the analysis of love metaphors in the two Chinese versions respectively. The third part is a contrastive study of similarities and differences between Chinese language and data in the comedies and reasons behind the linguistic expressions.Chapter Five summarizes the translation strategies used by the two translators and makes a comparative study of the translation strategies in the two versions. It involves two parts:the first part is the analyses of translation strategies in the two versions respectively; the last part is a comparative stud of the two versions and causes of the differences.Chapter Six is the conclusion, giving the major findings and the significance and limitations.In general, cognitive metaphor theory is a new field to explore. The combination of the cognitive metaphor theory and the Shakespearean works is a great attempt. |
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