A Study On The Translation Of Ecological Culture-loaded Words In Hong Loumeng From Theperspective Of Cognitive Metonymy

With the development of cross-cultural communication and internationalized process, Chinese traditional culture is moving toward the world. And the translation of Chinese classic literature works is increasing both in variety and in quantity. However, a number of culture-loaded words in literature works bring certain difficulty to translation for that they are difficult for translators to find the corresponding expression. Therefore, translating culture-loaded words accurately becomes an urgent problem to be solved in translation field. Ecological culture-loaded words are closely related to human life, so the thesis mainly studies the translation of ecological culture-loaded words.The thesis takes an empirical approach in order to make a contrastive analysis of the translation of ecological culture-loaded words in the two English versions of Hong Loumeng from the perspective of cognitive metonymy. Its purpose is to explore the translation strategies of ecological culture-loaded words and translation regularities. The ecological culture-loaded words are divided into four types according to the definition of ecology: animal culture-loaded words, plant culture-loaded words, climate and weather culture-loaded words and geography culture-loaded words. Furthermore, the metonymic type and transfer condition of every ecological culture-loaded words are given. Based on all this, the thesis is to inquire into the translation strategies of ecological culture-loaded words and the general regularities through statistics and observation of concrete examples. Major findings of this research are as follows:(1) The transfer condition in Yang’s translation gives priority to parallel moving and weakening. However, in Hawks’ translation, the number of parallel moving is almost equal to the amount of weakening which also occupies a large proportion, and the number of transfer is much higher than that in Yang’s version. And the differences of metonymic transfer condition in two versions can be explained with the reason that different nations have different cognitive manner and results in relation to the basic concepts of ecological words.(2) In Yang’s translation, the original vehicle translation strategy and the target tenor translation strategy are applied. And the frequency of the application of the target tenor translation is higher than that of the original vehicle translation. In Hawks’ translation, the target tenor translation,the original vehicle translation and the target vehicle translation are all applied and the frequencies of the application of three translation strategies decrease in turn.Through the research of this thesis, some inspiration can be given to the traditional cultural translation, so that people who speak different languages can span the cultural gap and the purpose of cultural exchange can be achieved.