| In recent years, scholars from home and abroad show great enthusiasm for Fortress Besieged research and mainly concentrating on figures of speech, pragmatic translation and translation skills. However, only a few studies are related to the cognitive process of translation. Based on Fauconnier & Turner’s conceptual integration theory (2002), this thesis attempts to build a cognitive network to explain the thinking process and cognitive mechanism in C-E translation process of character metaphors.Character metaphors’translation involves four parts, namely, a number of mental spaces, multiple cross-space mappings, several conceptual integration and vital relations. A translator will automatically build different psychological spaces in his perceiving process. Mappings work between any two of these mental spaces through one or more vital relations and finally form different emergent structures in the understanding spaces. Combined with other factors such as culture context, subjectivity of audience, subjectivity of translator, a translator finally forms his or her final conception of a discourse. Understanding this cognitive mechanism, the translator can make better thinking reasoning and choose a better translation strategy in his or her translation.In this research, the corpus is based on the collection of 75 pieces of character metaphors from the novel Fortress Besieged. Qualitative analysis is the main method to analyze different procedures of mappings on different character metaphors in the C-E translation.The following questions are to be solved:1) What is character metaphor?2) How many kinds of character metaphors are in the novel Fortress Besieged?3) How to present the mapping mechanism in the translation process of character metaphors?4) What are mapping processes for different kinds of character metaphors and how to choose corresponding translation strategies?Findings are as follows:1) Metaphor means a new conception presented through a known conception. Character metaphors mean that metaphors related to people, from which readers can learn appearance, mentality, character and emotion of characters.2) There are three major categories of character metaphors in Fortress Besieged. Metaphors for naming mean names of these characters have implied meaning. Metaphors with vehicles as animals mean tenors are human beings and vehicles are animals. If tenors are human beings and vehicles are objects, these metaphors are called character metaphors with vehicles as objects.3) The translation process of character metaphors is a construction of mental spaces and integration of concepts. In the stage of metaphor understanding, vital relations connect different mental spaces and generate mutual mappings between any two of mental spaces. Then, vital relations between input spaces are compressed into the blend space to form a new emergent structure, forming the understanding space. In the second stage of character metaphors’translation, culture context, subjectivity of audience, subjectivity of translator, along with the above understanding space, form the final result of cognition.4) In the understanding process of character metaphors, different types of metaphors have different cross-space mappings, among which vital relations are determining factors. During the stage of metaphor understanding of character naming, mappings are mainly affected by vital relation similarity. Cognizing for metaphors with vehicles as animals is decided by vital relations similarity and analogy. As for character metaphors of vehicles as objects, vital relations analogy and representation decide the mapping process. Combined with different mapping processes in metaphor understanding and factors in the stage of translation expression, translation strategies for character metaphors in Fortress Besieged are generated as follows:literal translation with footnotes, combination of literal translation and free translation, free translation with a different vehicle, supplement and omission. |
PDF Full Text Request