The Conceptual Metaphors In American Presidential Inaugural Addresses And Their Translation

In the late1970s, more and more scholars began to focus their attention on the study of metaphor and an "upsurge of metaphor" has emerged since then. Since1990s, this "upsurge of metaphor" has caught the eyes of Chinese scholars. Traditionally, metaphor is seen as a device of figure of speech, but after Lakoff and Johnsen published the book Metaphors We live By in1980, scholars began to understand metaphor from a new perspective, and started to take metaphor as a way of thinking and cognitive model. In the new cognitive view of linguistics, metaphor is prevalent in our everyday life and it exists not only in our daily language, but also in our thinking and action. Our conceptual system, which is the means relied by our thinking and action, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. And the conceptual system is the mapping from the source domain onto the target domain. That is to say, people understand one abstract domain through another familiar domain and the metaphor is the cognitive tool.As the study of metaphor is active unprecedentedly, the translation of metaphor has received more and more attention. On the surface, translation is the process of code-switching between two different languages. That is to say, translation is about the understanding of the source language and transferring the meaning of source language by means of target language. In this view, the translation of metaphor is the conversion between source language and target language. But in a cognitive view, translation is a complicated cognitive process and involves a complex transformation of the mode of thinking. In this cognitive direction, conceptual metaphor theory provides a new perspective and theoretical basis for the translation of metaphor. When translating metaphors, the translator should know about the psychological basis with which metaphor is produced and try to formulate specific translation strategies according to the working mechanism of metaphor.This dissertation uses the qualitative method and employs the conceptual metaphor theory and its working mechanism to analyze the conceptual metaphors and the related translation strategies in American presidential inaugural addresses (APIA for short). In the light of the corpus of previous president’s addresses and the corresponding Chinese version, this dissertation analyzes and classifies the conceptual metaphors which come from57different articles of APIA. By collecting and identifying the metaphors in APIA, five types of metaphor appear more frequently, which are journey metaphor, human metaphor, building metaphor, war metaphor and religion metaphor. It also finds that the American and Chinese political discourse share the similar source domain of journey, human, building and war, and possess the similar process of comprehending cognitive metaphors, and this forms the cognitive basis of metaphor translation. The analysis shows that in the process of metaphor translation in APIA, most of the metaphorical form and meaning can be transferred to the target language, obtaining the same response of the readers. Based on conceptual metaphor theory, three kinds of translation strategies are proposed:maintaining the original metaphors; converting the original metaphor; deleting the original metaphor. When there is a similar cognitive mapping of metaphorical concept, the original metaphor can be maintained and can be translated literally; if a similar mapping doesn’t exist, the meaning of original metaphors should be kept and the original metaphors can be converted or deleted according to context.