Limits Of Translatability Of And Principles Of Metaphor Translation

Ch’ien Chung-shu is known as a great critical realist in the history of Chinese literature. His masterpiece Fortress Besieged writes about "a certain segment of society and a certain kind of people in modern China" with incisive wit in a humorous and sarcastic way. The success of the book, to great extent, can be attributed to numerous refreshing metaphors contained in it. The book was first translated into English by Jeanne Kelly together with Nathan K. Mao in the1970s, thus imposing a highly demanding challenge on them to address the translation of these novel metaphors. However, it’s an objective fact that linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese and English do exist and can never be completely eliminated. As a result, the translatability of metaphor is limited to some extent and we still should devote more effort to conducting research on proper translating strategies to tackle the problems emerging from metaphor translation, in the hope of preserving their metaphoric features as well as the profound cultural implications.In this thesis, with examples from Fortress Besieged, the author expounds the limits of translatability of metaphors from linguistic and cultural perspectives in light of the minimum translating criteria put forward by Prof. Lv Jun. Great initiatives in exploring the principles and techniques of metaphor translation have already been launched by such famous linguists and translation theorists as Gideon Toury, Eugene Nida and some Chinese scholars. Drawing upon the essence of their theories, the author formulates two principles guiding Chinese-English metaphor translation:(1) seeking common grounds and reserving the differences;(2) compensating the loss in accordance with the context. Based on the analysis of examples from Fortress Besieged, the author believes that the following approaches can be employed in Chinese-English metaphor translation:(1) reproducing the same image in TL;(2) replacing the image in SL with a standard TL image;(3) literal translation plus explanation. The feasibility of the principles and approaches is verified through examples in Fortress Besieged. By adopting these approaches, the quality of the translated text is improved, reserving the metaphorical features, transmitting Chinese Culture as well as making the translation intelligible to TL readers.