Studies On Conceptual Metaphors In Fortress Besieged And Their Translations From The Cognitive Perspective

Studies on metaphor can be traced back two thousand years ago to Aristotle, sincewhom metaphors have been long researched as a mere figure of speech. This traditionwas broken off by the publication of the book Metaphors We Live By, co-authored byLakoff and Johnson in1980. In this book, the two authors proposed the ConceptualMetaphor Theory, claiming that metaphors are not merely figures of speech but a way ofhow human beings perceive the world and structure their experiences of interactionswith the outside world. What’s more, they put forward the notion of “image schema”, apreexisted pattern of conceptualization in human brains. Laying a solid foundation forthe future development of conceptual metaphor, this book is a breakthrough in thehistory of metaphor study, for it releases metaphors from being studied as a literarydevice.Though metaphor is at the center of all problems of translation theory, it has beensadly neglected in the translation theory. Newmark does shed his relativelycomprehensive light on metaphors by classifying metaphors into five types and putforward seven ways of metaphor translation. His discussion of metaphor translation,however, is usually made at the verbal level. Instead, if seen from a cognitiveperspective, the translation of metaphor is supposed to convey the pattern ofconceptualization from one language to another.The study on metaphor in this thesis is a case study on Ch’ien Chung-shu’sFortress Besieged, which is worldly renowned for its profusion in vivid metaphors. Andits English version translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao also becomes popularamong the western readers shortly after its publication.In this thesis, conceptual metaphors in Fortress Besieged are classified into twotypes. One is the conceptual metaphors having human as their target domain, and theother is the conceptual metaphors having emotion as their target domain. Under the framework of cognitive linguistics and on the basis of Newmark’s proposals, this thesisattempts to probe into the translation methods employed in translating conceptualmetaphors of this novel. Through examining the metaphor translation, the thesis drawsthe conclusion that the metaphors under different situations should be translated withproper methods so as to firstly, retain their original flavor and secondly, retain thereadability of the source text. As for those metaphors whose cultural connotations canbe well appreciated by both the source readers and target readers, it is suggested that theculturally-loaded images in the source language be literally translated, reproduced orreplaced with those in the target language. But with regard to those metaphorscontaining culturally unique images, the translator, serving as the bridge connecting theChinese and western cultures, shall endeavor to give top priority to retaining the foreignflavor in the target text. Only when the corresponding images can’t be found in thetarget language can the translator alter or delete the source images.