Procedures And Methods Of Metaphor Translation

Metaphors are widely used in Mo Yan’s novel to shape the literary characters and express the themes and become part of the author’s style. Those metaphors require loyal transference in translation though the rich cultural and historical elements mingled with metaphors increases the difficulty of keeping loyalty, but meanwhile, loyal translation of these elements may results in obstacles for the target language readers. This paper probes into the novel Feng Ru Fei Tun by Mo Yan and its translation Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Howard Goldblatt to find out the solutions used by this accomplished translator in the contradictory situation.Through comparative study of the original and the translated text, it is found that literal translation, semantic translation and the combination of both methods are most commonly used by Goldblatt, in accordance with his intention of keeping the flavor of the original text to the possibly furthest extent. But from the perspective of compensation, implicit compensation is preferred over explicit compensation by the translator and among the implicit compensations there are grammatical, semantic and cultural compensation. Goldblatt’s translation methods are determined by the original text’s stylistic features and the types of metaphors used in the original text and the readability of the translation.