A Study Of Hyperbole And Its Translation In Shakespeare’s Four Tragedies From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

Shakespeare’s drama is the treasure of art. Shakespeare uses plenty of hyperbole rhetoric in his plays to enrich the plot, vividly describe characters and meet the need of expressing feelings. Compared with metaphor and personification, hyperbole is relatively small in number, but its role in the drama is significant and the study of hyperbole is valuable.This thesis makes a relatively systematical research on the Shakespeare’s hyperbole from a new perspective -- Conceptual Blending Theory. Conceptual blending is a dynamic and creative cognitive activity that four mental spaces are first connected to each other through projection, mapping and dynamic simulation, and then new relationships and structures are produced to form the new meaning and concepts. In general, conceptual blending includes four mental spaces, namely two input spaces, a generic space and a blended space. The network of conceptual blending can be divided into four categories, simplex networks, mirror networks, single-scope networks and double-scope networks.All hyperbole examples in this thesis are from Shakespeare’s four tragedies. This thesis first explores hyperbole rhetoric in the plays. Then by using the network models of conceptual blending theory, this thesis studies the cognitive and understanding mechanism of hyperbole. Based on the four spaces and network models of conceptual blending theory, this paper also divides Shakespeare’s hyperbole into simplex blending hyperboles, mirror blending hyperboles, single-scope blending hyperboles and double-scope blending hyperboles. Every kind of hyperboles is empirically analyzed according to the corresponding translation examples. Finally, this thesis conducts a comparative study on four main existed Chinese translation versions written by Zhu Shenghao, Liang Shiqiu, Bian Zhilin and Fang Ping from the perspective of conceptual blending theory. Three strategies for hyperbole translation are summarized after the comparison: complete corresponding projection method, semi corresponding projection method (original language projection and target language projection), and zero corresponding blending projection method. Each translation strategy is applied to different situation to form an appropriate translation.