Translation Of The Cognitive Metaphor:Research On The Mode And Strategy

Metaphor which is a common linguistic phenomenon exists everywhere in life, sometaphor translation has long been concerned about. Once Aristotle, Quintilian, Richards,Jacob Jackson studied metaphor and developed a great deal of theories and strategies aboutmetaphor translation. But their research focused on the context of rhetoric, the level oflanguage, mainly discussing the modified role played by metaphor at the sentence level.Limited to the traditional perspective, the function of metaphor research to metaphortranslation does not seem satisfactory. The translators or readers’ misunderstanding ofmetaphor even cause cultural conflict. In addition, metaphorical translation is essential.Therefore, metaphor translation needs new theoretical viewpoint.Studying metaphor form the cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology points ofview makes up the defects of traditional metaphor research which reveals that language andthought coexist in life, accord with the needs of metaphor translation. Metaphors We Live Bywritten by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in1980was published, opposing the traditionalconcept of metaphor. They insisted that metaphor is not only a rhetoric nature, but also a wayof thinking, in order to reveal its cognitive property of metaphor, that is, human beings used amore familiar concept to explain or understand another abstract or alien concept to make theprocess of cognition more vivid and concrete. In recent years, cognitive function of metaphorhas been gradually become a hot topic of many disciplines. Metaphor rhetoric and cognitiveresearch deepen and broaden the understanding of metaphor of humans, while promoting thedevelopment of studies and practice of metaphor translation.The cognitive research of metaphor is still at its primary stage, but its inspiration tometaphor can’t be ignored. So this article analyzes psychological mechanism, mode ofoperation, methods of metaphor in the process of translation, then it discusses cognitivestrategy of metaphor translation from the perspective of modern cognitive linguistics andcognitive psychology, combined with the theories of translation and Nida’s equivalent anddynamic translation theory.This article concludes five chapters. Chapter I is the study background, purpose,meaning, method and overall structure. Chapter II is the development and overview ofcognitive translation of metaphor. On the basis of the traditional metaphor translation, we findout some limitations, while the cognitive metaphor translation is able to break through theselimitations. Chapter III presents the processing mechanism and mode of cognitive metaphortranslation. Since the translation of cognitive metaphor has its advantages, the article reflectsthe advantages from the mechanism and mode. Chapter IV is about the translation strategiesof cognitive metaphor by exploring the translation strategies from the specific methods. Chapter V is the conclusion, discussing the limitations and advantages of the cognitivemetaphor translation, and directions for future research.