On Metaphor Translation In Literature For Children From The Perspective Of Cognition

The translation of Literature for Children (LC) from foreign languages into Chinese can be dated back to the late Qing Dynasty. However, not enough importance had been attached to the translation of LC for a very long time. LC was regarded as an accessory in the literary circle and the translation of LC had been on the edge of literature translation. However, the number of articles concerning the study to the translation of LC has increased apparently in recent years, and their methods and approaches differ in many ways. The study to the translation of LC is on a rising trend in China.Metaphor is one of the most favored figures of speech in LC. The previous researches state that the difficulty level of a metaphor is the main obstacle which influences children’s comprehension of metaphor; and when it comes to the translation of metaphor in LC, simple words and short sentences are enough in giving ideas from the original text. As a matter of fact, there is no easy thing in translating metaphor in LC. What needs to point out is that children can only understand metaphor based on their cognitive abilities. In this sense, when translating metaphors in LC, apart from dealing with the differences of cultural and historical background, and social customs and so on, between the foreign country and China; children’s characteristics in different age levels, like language development, thinking and logic ability, memory and the like, which have a great effect on children’s understanding of metaphor, should also be taken into consideration by translators. Grasping a sound knowledge of children’s cognitive ability is a must as well as a difficulty in translating LC. As a result, a good knowledge of children’s cognitive ability is the precondition in translating metaphor and all the LC.Because of the unique characteristics of cognition and linguistic ability of children plus gaped cultural distance, cognition theory is introduced to study metaphor translation in LC. Through the study to both the original metaphors and translated metaphors in the Chinese versions, it is found that in translating metaphors in LC, it is a must to take children’s lexical, syntactic and semantic ability into consideration. Concerning metaphor translation in LC, three suggestions are put forward in this thesis:first, based on children’s lexical level, it is a need to adopt child-oriented language to explain metaphor upon their receptive abilities; what kind of expression children would prefer to use that is within their knowledge background and life experience should also be applied in the description of metaphor in Chinese; second, based on children’s syntactic level, simplified sentences are better as well as children favored sentence patterns like short sentence, exclamatory sentence, interrogative sentence etc. and the change of sentence pattern is a must sometimes; third, based on children’s semantic level, it would be better to adopt children familiar concept and ways of expression. This paper emphasizes that translators should first fully understand the characteristics of children’s cognitive development before setting about translating, so as to do a good job on metaphor translation for children.