| Traditionally, metaphor has been regarded as a figure of speech, i.e. as more or less an ornamental device used in rhetorical style. However, since the 1970 s, with the development of cognitive linguistics, people’s understanding of metaphor has broken through the limitation of original rhetorical device. Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By has proved to be a turning point in the process of metaphor development. They lead metaphor to a broader cognitive category and maintain that metaphor is not just a stylistically attractive way of expressing ideas by means of language, but a way of thinking about things. It is not arbitrary for it is deeply rooted in the thought and culture of human beings. The thinking process of metaphor is a mapping process from a source domain to target domain. It can help people use the existing, concrete concepts to understand the abstract and strange phenomena.This thesis adopts the conceptual metaphor theory as theoretical foundation, China Daily and The Economist as corpus, with an attempt to classify the conceptual metaphors and their working mechanism in English economic news. The result shows that conceptual metaphor commonly exists in economic discourse. In addition, by classification, the conceptual metaphors involved in economic discourse mainly are: HUMAN-BEING METAPHOR, UP- DOWN METAPHOR, JOURNEY METAPHOR, WAR METAPHOR, GAME METAPHOR, BUILDING METAPHOR, LIQUID METAPHOR and CONTAINER METAPHOR.Based on Mandelblit’s “Cognitive Translation Hypothesis”, the author has made a discussion on metaphor translation strategies in economic discourse and brought forth the following conclusion. The translation of metaphor in economic discourse should be performed in three conditions: when there are similar mapping conditions between English and Chinese, the images of the metaphor should be retained, and literal translation is the most appropriate way. To be specific, it mainly includes literal translation, literal translation plus addition, literal translation plus paraphrase, metaphor to simile; when two cultures share similar mapping conditions but different lexical forms, an equivalent metaphor expression in TL can be adopted to replace that in SL, that is metaphor to metaphor strategy; when two cultures have different mapping conditions, the sense but not form of the metaphor should be taken into account. In this light, free translation can be applied.In the end, the author summarizes the theoretical and practical meanings of the thesis, aiming at giving some references in the study of metaphors in English economic news. |
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