A Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese Translation Of English Film Titles

Halliday’s grammatical metaphor(GM) plays a very important role in the development of linguistic theories. There are a lot of writings about the development and applications of GM and scholars both at home and abroad have done a lot of deep researches from different perspectives, however, few works are in regard to Chinese discourses. This study chooses Chinese translation of English film titles(CTEFT) as the data and tries to take GM as the theoretical framework to analyze them in order to find some rules and enlightenments for English translation of Chinese film titles.GM is an important domain of systemic functional grammar. This thesis first reviews the history and achievements of GM study, and then collects a large number of Chinese titles of English films from internet. With analyzing and comparing the data, this thesis finds out that GM is widely used in CTEFT. Among them, ideational metaphors are very important linguistic phenomena and account for a major proportion. Although the proportion of interpersonal metaphors and textual metaphors is small, they can explain some special phenomena of Chinese translations reasonably. Then, according to Halliday’s and Martin’s standard classification, 450 film titles that contain the phenomenon of GM are divided into three types: of ideational metaphors, of interpersonal metaphors and of textual metaphors, and some new classifications are found in CTEFT such as the transformation from adjectives into verbs. The metaphors’ generation mechanisms of each type are elaborated, in order to find the rules of Chinese translation.After elaborating the specific applications of GM in different types of CTEFT, some findings are presented. Firstly, ideational metaphors are mainly realized by the transformation of word classes, in which nominalization, verbalization and adjectivization stand out. Nominalization can make film titles more concise by condensing meanings. Verbalization can make film titles more vivid by taking advantage of the characters of verb-center Chinese. Adjectivization can enrich many qualities of film titles. Secondly, interpersonal metaphors provide emotions and attitudes for film titles by the application of metaphors of mood and modality, thus they can narrow the distance between films and audience. Thirdly, Metaphorical themes and metaphorical news in textual metaphors present CTEFT summarily and highlight the topics of films. At last, the study of GM in CTEFT not only can find out some rules and give some enlightenments to English translation of Chinese film titles, but also has some positive significance for overseas promotion of Chinese films.