Metaphor Translation Under The Guidance Of Relevance Theory

Metaphor is ubiquitous. People use six metaphors a minute according to statistics. The metaphor has been attracting a host of scholars because of its high frequency in people’s daily life. The most innovative theory of metaphor is conceptual metaphor theory advocated by Lakoff and Johnson, which enables metaphor to shift itself from merely a figure of speech to a study explored from the cognitive perspective.Due to the close relations between metaphors and human conceptual systems, scholars hold different opinions about whether the metaphor can be translated and what strategies the translators will adopt in this regard. The thesis adopts qualitative method and takes Fortress Besieged as a case study in order to discuss the metaphor types and its translation under the guidance of relevance theory.According to relevance theory, translation is also an act of communication, which follows general rules of communication. But quite different from common communication, translation is a cross-cultural and cross-language activity. It contains two ostension-inference processes. During these two processes, the translator firstly acts as the audience and secondly as a communicator. He has to infer the writer’s intention and anticipate the cognitive environment of the target readers. The only decisive standard is optimal relevance. That is to say, the translator creates sufficient contextual effect and calls for little processing effort from the target readers.The translators of Fortress Besieged take the contextual effect and the processing effort of the target readers into considerations. They employ both literal translation and free translation, including retaining the metaphor, turning the metaphor into simile, adding notes and abandoning the metaphor, etc. The translation generally maintains the original flavor of the source text and attempts to achieve the same effect in target language. The success of the translation lies in the overlap between the writer’s intention and the target readers’ expectation.