A Study On Connotations In Animal Metaphors And Its Strategies Of Translation

Metaphors have always played a role in language which cannot be ignored inhuman beings’ lives. In traditional views of metaphor, metaphors are regarded asrhetorical means. Through the development of the study of linguistics, linguists havegradually realized that metaphors have already become a tool used to recognize andunderstand the world. Metaphors We Live By authored by George Lakoff and MarkJohnson gives metaphor research a qualitative leap. They shift the center of metaphorstudy from a figurative function to a cognitive nature, that is to say, people can learnabout the abstract world through metaphor. Through the mappings across differentconceptual domains, the conceptual metaphor is achieved from vivid and concretesource domain to general and abstract target domain. The characteristics of the sourcedomain are partially mapped onto the target domain. By this mapping, people get toknow about the new concepts. On the basis of Lakoff and Johnson’s ConceptualMetaphor Theory, this paper aims to study the differences between Chinese andEnglish animal metaphors, translating strategies, and making use of animal metaphorsboth in Chinese and English.Animals are one of the closest companions to human beings, and they havemany similar features to them. Animal metaphors, which frequently appear incommunication, play a vital role in enriching the language. Animal metaphors are abasic way for people to cognize and understand the world, and it deserves moreattention. Animal metaphor refers to metaphorical expression hidden in language, andit can be understood by the people living in the same community. However, thedifferent geography, culture, and thinking pattern present a certain difficulty in thetranslation of animal metaphors. In order to understand animal metaphors of differentlanguages better, it is necessary to investigate Chinese and English animal metaphors in a systematic way.Translation was usually seen as a transformation at the linguistic aspect.Because of the limitation of traditional linguistic, some scholars studied thetranslation of metaphors only from rhetorical aspect. Since1970s, translation studywas gradually taken into interdisciplinary. The booming in cognitive linguistic gavevitality to translation studies. This thesis mainly focuses on analyzing the differencesand similarities between Chinese and English animal metaphors and exploring thecause for discrepancy, using the conceptual metaphor as theoretical frame. Finally,this paper studies how to exactly translate Chinese and English animal metaphors withNida’s dynamic equivalence theory.