A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese State Leader’s Discourses And Their English Translation

Metaphor study has drawn the attention of researchers for a very long time.Grammatical metaphor is a creative and relatively new terms coined by the functionallinguist Halliday in the late20thcentury to study metaphor. It argues that metaphorsdo not only exist on the lexical level but on the grammatical level. This provides avery large ground for researchers to study metaphor and widen people’s horizon.Since the term was put forward, many scholars and researchers have applied thistheory to analyze various discourses ranging from economic, advertisement, politicaldiscourses etc. Political discourses, in particular, are the hot-spot topic to study. Manypolitical discourses are studied either from single Chinese or single English, orcontrast Chinese discourses and the same kind of English discourses. But it is rare thatpolitical discourses and their corresponding translation are studied comparatively. Sothis thesis tries to study the Chinese political discourses and their English translationcontrastively, aiming to find the similarities and differences of GM distributed inChinese and English as well as their application to Chinese-English translation.The thesis chooses ten political discourses delivered by five Chinese politicalleaders from the official government websites and authoritative newspapers. GMtheory is used to analyze these discourses and their translation through comparativemethod. What’s more, the distribution of GM in Chinese discourses and their Englishtranslation will be collected. So both quantitative and qualitative methods are appliedto analyze the data.The research found that Grammatical Metaphors exist widely in both Chineseand English. The number of Ideational GM distributed in English in is much morethan that in Chinese. Especially, Ideational GM realized by Transferences betweenProcesses, Nominalizations, Verberlizations. However, the number of InterpersonalMetaphor in English and Chinese is almost the same. The reasons are various. Englishis a hypotaxis language, thus put more emphasis on the logical relation between different clauses. The different word formation also contributes to the differences inVerberlizations. All these findings are very useful to Chinese-English translationwhich will also be discussed in this paper.