A Translation Study On Conceptual Metaphot Of "Suan", "Tian", "Ku", "La" In Chinese

Metaphor study has a long history of over two thousand years, and it can be traced back to Aristotle in ancient Greece, who treated metaphor as a rhetorical device used to enrich poetic and literary writings. At first, metaphor was not considered in the cognitive level, and people believed that metaphor just meant the process of one thing referring to other things. But this viewpoint is not comprehensive until 1980 when Lakoff and Johnson published the Metaphors We Live By and studied the metaphor from the cognitive perspective, which made a new breakthrough on metaphor studies. They pointed out that metaphor is not only a rhetorical device, but also a powerful tool for people to recognize the world. In the perspective of its function, it refers to the mappings among different cognitive domains. And translating is an activity of cross-domain mapping, which refers to the mappings between the source domain and the target domain. Therefore, metaphor plays a significant role in the process of translation.The formations and changes of words in language are closely related to human’s experience to everything on earth. Sense of taste is the naturally physiological reaction when human first come to the world, therefore, taste words emerge in languages. And because of different national cultures and thinking modes, there are a lot of different metaphorical cognitive modes about taste words existing in Chinese and English.This thesis takes taste words " 酸" (Suan), " 甜 " (Tian), "苦 " (Ku), "辣 " (La) in Chinese as examples and collects related morphemes in Chinese and English for research. It makes a thorough analysis and elaboration from the perspective of metaphor cognition and culture, and makes a comparison between Chinese basic taste words and English basic taste words. The study shows that there are some similar metaphors in Chinese and English, which are due to the similarities in the aspects of people’s thinking mode and life experiences, while the differences are mainly caused by the different natural environment, history and values. This thesis attempts to adopt literal translation (retaining original metaphors) and free translation (replacing the SLimage with another established TL image, deleting the original metaphor when repetition occurs, etc.) to further explore the deep cultural roots of metaphor differences in Chinese and English so as to improve the cultural pragmatic value of metaphor translation of taste words and solve the translation problems of taste words in different metaphorical context.