| Metaphor, traditionally, was merely regarded as a rhetoric device. However, with the rising of the cognitive linguistics in the1980th, especially with the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s masterpiece Metaphors We Live By, metaphor is regarded as an important way of thinking and important means to know the objective world for human beings. According to the cognitive linguistics,"metaphor is a set of conceptual correspondences, or more technically, mappings, between two conceptual domains, a source and a target (Lakoff and Johnson,1980:26). The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another.Metaphor translation, traditionally, was mainly studied from the rhetoric perspective. According to this perspective, when translate metaphors, the task of translators is to find the equivalent metaphorical expressions in the target language (TL) to represent the meanings of metaphorical expressions in the source language (SL), based on a rhetoric analysis of the metaphorical expressions in the source texts. In this sense, metaphor translation is just a transferring process of language symbols between the SL and the TL. However, the flourish of the cognitive studies of metaphor provides a new angle for the study of metaphor translation—the cognitive angle. According to the cognitive perspective, metaphor translation should take the cognitive nature of metaphor into full account.Political speech is an important and effective means used by politicians to express their ideas and viewpoints and to convince the public. As the language of political speech is usually abstract and obscure for the ordinary public to understand, politicians often employ metaphors as a means to make their speeches simple and understandable, vivid and attractive, persuading and convincing. Thus, there are large numbers of metaphors in political speeches. Barack Obama, the current and the first African-American president in the history of the United States, is also expert in using metaphors in his speeches to help him realize political purposes. In general, metaphors in Obama’s speeches are various in categories, expressive, touching and persuading, which are good representative of Obama’s excellent speech talents and extraordinary charisma. So, it is necessary and significant to translate Obama’s metaphors in his speeches into Chinese, so as to help millions of Obama’s Chinese fans have a better understanding of the charms of Obama’s language as well as the implied meanings (political attitudes, viewpoints and beliefs) rooted in Obama’s metaphors.This thesis takes Obama’s State of the Union Addresses (SUA) as its research texts, with Wang Ruize’s (王瑞泽,2010) Chinese translation version and translation resources from the website http://www.readeng.cn.as translation texts. The theoretical frameworks of this thesis are Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory as well as Peter Newmark’s metaphor translation methods. In chapter four, the author collects, identifies and finds out major categories of metaphors in Obama’s SUA, and reveals the metaphorical mapping processes of these metaphors. The author finds out that the major categories of metaphors in Obama’s SUA are as follows:the JOURNEY, HUMAN BEING, BUILDING, UP-DOWN, SPORTS, NATURE and RELIGION metaphors. After an analysis of metaphorical mapping processes of metaphors in Obama’s SUA, in chapter five, based on the cognitive approach to metaphor and translation as well as metaphor translation methods proposed by Peter Newmark, the author sums up five metaphor translation methods, that is,"reserving the original image";"changing the original image";"retainning the original image with explanatory notes";"deleting the original image"; and "converting the original image to sense" to translate metaphorical expressions in Obama’s SUA. |
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