On Categorization And Translations Of Body Metaphor (Heart) In Lu Xun's Fictions From The Cognitive Perspective

In the long western traditions,Rhetoric,Grammar and Logic had been called "the three disciplines".As an important part of Rhetoric,in ancient Greece,Aristotle has termed metaphor as "epiphora of the name".He believed that metaphor was an overlap of Poetics and Rhetoric and involved wording.In 1980,Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live by in which they proposed conceptual metaphor theory that announced the turn of metaphor research from objectivism to cognitive subjectivism.They believed that metaphor exists not only in our languages,but also in minds and acts.However,it originates from our daily experience validly rather than coincidentally.The most familiar way for human beings to recognize objects(target domain)in the environment is to use their own body organs(source domain)as the measuring standard.Body metaphor appears in this process.Due to profound experience of people about their bodies,body metaphor is one of the main sources of metaphor.Heartbeat,the energetic vibration of people's daily lives,makes heart metaphor one of the main sources of body metaphor.This thesis selects two English versions of famous Chinese writer Lu Xun's three fiction collections:Call to Arms,Wandering and Old Tales Retold as research objects.The first one was translated by the Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang and the second was translated by the British sinologist Julia Lovell.Then,the author chooses the translation of heart metaphors as the research data.According to statistics,there are 255 heart metaphors totally in the three fiction collections.Through qualitative and quantitative methods,the author tries to explore the four questions.1.How many categories of the heart metaphors are there in Lu Xun's fictions?2.What translation strategies did the Yangs and Julia Lovell employ to translate those categories of the heart metaphors in Lu Xun's fictions?3.Which English version reflects the characteristics of heart metaphors in the source text better?4.What are the factors influencing their selections of the translation strategies?Based on their lexical categories,this thesis divides them into four groups:nominal heart metaphor,verbal heart metaphor,adjective heart metaphor and adverbial heart metaphor.It has been found that both the Yangs' version and Julia's version employed respectively the domesticating strategy and the foreignizing strategy to translate heart metaphors.The foreignizing strategy takes the dominant position in the Yangs' version(70%)and the domesticating strategy reigns Julia Lovell's version(55.3%).In the translation of the nominal heart metaphor,verbal heart metaphor,adjective heart metaphor and adverbial heart metaphor,Yang's version shows the more enthusiastic preference than Lovell's version on foreignizing strategy(76.5%,60.8%,69.6%,66.7%).It suggests that the Yangs' version maintains more characteristics of the heart metaphors in the source text than Lovell's.The diversity attributes to the different intentions of translation.The Yangs tend to expand Chinese literature and spread Chinese culture in the west while Julia Lovell aims at decreasing the understanding difficulties of target readers and keeping the peripheral translated literature from being expelled and extinct.This research contrastively study heart metaphors in two English versions of Lu Xun's three fiction collections translated by the Yangs and Julia Lovell.It broadens the research of body metaphor and includes some limitations.