A Study On Chinese Translation Of Synaesthetic Metaphors In Jude The Obscure From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Synaesthesia is to be considered as a kind of rhetorical skills in traditional Rhetoric.However, it has already become more than a rhetoric method but also a kind of metaphor, acognitive model for human beings to think and act along with the development andprevalence of cognitive linguistics.Human’s five sense organs are interlinked with each other,and one sensory stimulus would bring a similar feeling to another sense. The source domainand target domain of synaesthetic metaphor structure belong to different sensory categoriesaccording to daily logical classification system, and the diversity (semantic conflict) theyproduce is the basic condition of meaning construction of synaesthetic metaphor (Wang Caili,2004:40-41). The uniqueness of synaesthesia lies in that it describes one kind of sensoryimpressions by the words representing another sense, and the mapping and transferencebetween two or more sensory domains produce a particular aesthetic effect. Synaestheticmetaphor can be regarded as a special case of ordinary metaphors, which can be studied andanalyzed from cognitive perspective. Synaesthetic phenomena lie in hierarchical distributions,and in linguistic expression, the words expressing the lower-level sense can be used todecorate those describing the higher-level sense, while in contrast the instances are obviouslyless (Li Guonan,1996:39). The senses people usually talk about are of five basic kinds, andthey are touch, taste, smell, hearing and vision according the levels from below to high. As amatter of fact, synaesthetic metaphor precisely reflect the mental activities of the characters(psychological state/emotional changes), and the mental activities cause the communicationamong sense organs, and then integrated. Translation studies, is still a relatively new topic inEnglish-Chinese translation studies from cognitive perspective. There are still not manystudies on whether the Chinese translation of synaesthetic metaphors in literary works areappropriate or in place, while systematic and detail analysis and discussions are even rare.Jude the Obscure is the last work of Hardy, and he claimed to show a life-and-deathstruggle between spirit and flesh. With only several main characters, this novel has richmental activities of figures. The author describes the lifetime tragedy of rural young man Judeby a sorrowful tone. The hero Jude was a diligent and hardworking young man, but he wasalways rejected outside the university; in marriage, he and his cousin—Sue’s love could notbe tolerant by the church, either. Under the double strike, he died with a deep regret when hewas only thirty. Jude can be regarded as an individual full of contradictions, struggling in theinterlacing of the pursuit of ideals and the brutality of reality all his life. Accompanied withlarge amount of mental activities of the main character, there are many synaesthetic metaphors in this novel.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, based on the related research achievementson synaesthetic metaphor, through the comparison and analysis of the three Chinese versionsof Jude the Obscure, this thesis tries to explore the principles and methods on synaestheticmetaphor translation, and expects to provide some inspirations for the English-Chinesetranslation of synaesthetic metaphor...