On Translation Strategies Of Animal Metaphors In Lu Xun’s Fictions From The Cognitive Perspective

In the traditional metaphor study metaphor is just regarded as a kind of rhetoric. But cognitive linguistics thinks that metaphor is not only a characteristic of language alone, but also a matter of thought. And Lakoff and Johnson put forward conceptual metaphor theory in the masterpiece Metaphors We Live By (1980) for the first time. For thousands of years, the humans’survival and development is closely related with animals. During the long course of contact with animals, humans know animals very well and obtain rich knowledge about them. Therefore, people tend to use animals to refer to human beings or human-related things. This is called animal metaphor.Lu Xun (1881-1936) is a great writer in modern Chinese literature. This thesis collects162animal metaphors from his three collections of novels:Call to Arms, Wandering and Old Tales Retold. According to their characteristics, which are divided into appearance metaphor, character metaphor, behavior metaphor, sound metaphor and relation metaphor, this thesis selects46typical examples to carry on the analysis. Through the qualitative and quantitative research, this paper tries to find out what translation strategies the Yangs and Lan Shiling take in their translations, how the effect is and what factors influence them.It is found that both the Yangs and Lan Shiling have adopted foreignizing strategy and domesticating strategy and foreignizing strategy takes the dominant position in both the two versions. But the percentage of foreignizing strategy in the Yangs’version is higher than that in the Lan Shiling’s. In the treatment of animal idiom metaphors, there is much difference. The Yangs tend to employ foreignizing strategy, while Lan Shiling tends to use domesticating strategy. It mainly depends on their different translation purposes. Entrusted by Foreign Languages Press, the Yangs translated Lu Xun’s fictions with the aim at carrying forward the traditional Chinese culture and national spirit. And Lan Shiling’s translation, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China:The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, published by the British giant press, Penguin Books, is designed to make English-speaking readers easy to understand.This paper only studies the animal metaphors in Lu Xun’s fictions and has some limitations. But to some extent it still has practical significance. On the one hand it enriches animal metaphor research scope. On the other hand it gives some inspiration for the future animal metaphor translation.