A Cognitive Approach To The Translation Of Metaphor In Diplomatic Texts In The Case Of The MFA Website Translation

The official website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs(MFA) releases news, expounds Chinese policies and covers important foreign affairs with the diplomatic texts. To release the diplomatic news with accuracy and conciseness, and expound Chinese diplomatic policy in a reader-friendly way, metaphors are employed to present the intangible, complicated and abstract matters, experience, and objects. Therefore, the research on metaphor translation in the diplomatic texts is significant for the accurate, concise, and reader-friendly translation of the texts.Metaphor is systematic mapping from the source domain(SD) to the target domain(TD). Metaphors in the MFA website are systematic, novel and solemn,and culture-specific. Metaphor translation requires delivering the information and communication of the source language to the target readers and complying with the cognitive environments of the target language, by which the contextual effect and the optimal relevance of the metaphor translation is achieved. Therefore, metaphor translation in the MFA website can be attained on the basis of the equal inferential distance principle and the complementary principle of relevance theory.This thesis conducts an empirical research on the Chinese-English metaphor translation in the MFA website. This thesis collects, analyzes and classifies the metaphors, and explores the translation method of metaphors with similar mapping condition(SMC) and different mapping condition(DMC) on the basis of relevance theory. Metaphors with SMC should be translated literally and the translation method for metaphors with DMC is analyzed on three conditions accordingly: metaphors with different SD and similar TD are mainly rendered with idiomatic translation; metaphor with similar TD and no SD are mainly translated with paraphrase; for metaphors with different TD, transliteration plus addition is the main method.