Personification In Shakespeare’s Plays And Its Translation From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

As a common rhetorical device, personification is frequently used in Shakespeare’s plays. It is easy for the author to describe things profoundly, take advantage of abstract or concrete objects to express his emotions and give the impression of being lovely and vivid to audiences or readers so as to make them have a clear cognition and understanding about the scenes, emotions, character portrayal, etc.. Therefore, the thesis is representative and meaningful for focusing on personification.The thesis conducts a systematic and deep research on personification in Shakespeare’s representative plays the four tragedies. First of all, based on the former definitions and classifications of personification both in Chinese and English, and combined with the expressions of personification and features in Shakespeare’s four tragedies, the thesis concludes a proper definition of personification, classifies the personification in the four tragedies into three types, and analyzes its expressiveness in language in the tragedies. Second, after exploring all the personification in the plays with the help of conceptual metaphor, the thesis finds the metaphorical mechanism and its cognitive functions behind the rhetoric device, that is, personification is the result of mapping from the source domain of human beings to the target domain of nonhuman entities, and that personification serves as a way of expressing feelings for characters, an effective cognitive tool for us readers to understand the world and a new perspective for us to understand things, which also has reasoning function so as to lead readers to think of scenes in these plays. At last, with the application of the translation philosophy of conceptual metaphor, the thesis compares and analyzes five translators’ different approaches to translating personification, and concludes tentative and effective translation strategies, namely, equivalence translation, conversion translation and free translation. The application of conceptual metaphor theory in the research of rhetoric in Shakespeare’s plays can not only help us to explore the metaphorical mechanism and cognitive functions behind personification, but also provide a breakthrough point for research on personification in Shakespeare’s plays.