A Study Of Metaphor Translation Strategies From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

With a history of over 2000 years, metaphor studies have been traditionally confined to the range of Rhetoric. Ever since the cognitive turn of metaphor studies in1970 s, metaphor has been identified as a commonly-used cognitive system and thinking pattern, whose nature lies in human's basic comprehension of abstract concepts, instead of merely some linguistic phenomena. An outcome of this cognitive turn, initiated by Lakoff and Johnson in their joint book Metaphors We Live By, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory has it that metaphor, a cognitive activity, helps us experience and understand one thing in terms of another, and its whole cognitive process is realized through structural mappings of the source domain onto the target domain. And due to the extensiveness of metaphor use in languages and cultures, this new approach to metaphor studies sheds light on studies on metaphor translation.As the only long-length novel ever written by the litterateur Chi'en Chung-shu,Wei-ch'eng tells a tragedy life in a comic but natural tone. Together with its other features of engaging plot, multi-leveled theme and symbolism, sharp and humorous language, a large quantity of metaphors, the most prominent one, mock the weakness in personality and morality of the intellectuals, reveal their spiritual confusion with full wisdom and irony, and pave its way of being acclaimed as “The Scholars in Modern Times”. Xia Zhiqing, an American sinologist, makes such comments on Wei-ch'eng that “it is the most delightful and carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature” in his work A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, which draws western scholars' overwhelming interest in studies on modern Chinese literature and attributes to the publication of its English version—Fortress Besieged, a joint work by Jeanny Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. The translated work, well-acknowledged as it is,has been receiving scholarly papers on its metaphors' translation from the perspectives ranging from the Relevance Theory Approach, Functional Equivalence,Aesthetics of Translation, and Conceptual Blending Theory to Adaption Theory, to name just a few.The thesis is about to classify metaphors in Wei-ch'eng into the structural category of “Human” metaphors(“Human” as the target domain) and the ontological and orientational categories of “Human-Related” metaphors(the target domains of“Utterance” “Emotion” “Relationship” “Statue”) and to analyze their cognitive process under the framework of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its Classification Approach in hope of concluding different translation strategies chosenand offering some remedy translation where necessary.Through a quantitative study of the metaphors' translation in the English version—Fortress Besieged, this thesis arrives at the conclusion that its translation strategies center on literal translation, with liberal translation being its peripheral one.Retaining the original image, with its advantage of the maximized convey of the source text's meaning and full display of the source text's flavor, has its weak point of cultural defaults. Therefore, on the basis of the initiative classification of metaphors in Wei-ch'eng into metaphors of “Human” and metaphors of “Human-Related”, the study makes a detailed analysis of their mapping process and thus concludes that metaphor translation shall put the strategy of literal translation with original image kept as the prominent one, and adopt other approaches such as liberal translation to compensate the cultural defaults if there should be any.