Metaphor Rendering In Poetry-A Practice Report On Sight Interpreting In Sulivan’s Poetry Workshop Program

With the booming of the One Belt, One Road initiatives, international communication becomes more and more prevalent. Therefore rendering, as a tool for people from various countries to communicate, plays a more and more significant role.The author is engaged in this communication-facilitating task. The author is assigned to assist an American poet with the rendering of a collection of Chinese poems into English which might be published in the United States. While the author is doing the first part of the rendering work, sight interpreting of those Chinese poems, he is confronted with a problem—the comprehending and rendering strategies for metaphors, which are quite often seen in poems.The author refers to a large quantity of literature, he finally discovers that the conceptual blending theory which views metaphor from a cognitive perspective and regards metaphor as ubiquitous to people’s daily thought to be a very efficient and conducive approach to comprehend metaphor and select rendering strategies.In this thesis, the author streamlines the studies on metaphor and its rendering in the past and introduces conceptual blending theory. Afterwards, according to conceptual blending theory, the author classifies the metaphors in the poem collection into four categories and analyzes their rendering strategies respectively: the rendering for metaphors of simplex networks, metaphors of mirror networks and metaphors of single-scope networks can all be resorted to literal rendering strategy. Regarding metaphors of double-scope networks, free rendering is a preferable choice.All in all, metaphor abounds in poetry, which constitutes the crux of the poetry rendering issue. However, conceptual blending theory provides a novel approach that views both metaphor and rendering from a cognitive perspective and therefore facilitates to a large extent the rendering of poetry, which might also contribute to the cause of cultural communication.