A Study Of Metaphor In Frog And Its Translation

According to the theory of cognitive linguistics,metaphor,as a kind of thinking modes,using the known,familiar concept to cognize the unknown,strange concept,is one of the indispensable tool that help people to understand the objective world.Metaphor is a language that merges into the experience and culture,so the difference of every national development history,culture characteristic,thinking mode and values may cause the metaphorical mapping in different languages.This paper takes Mo Yan’ s novely frog and its Japanese translation as the research objects,selects illustrative sentences that are metaphor both in Chinese and Japanese as a contrast,and analyzes the correspondence of lexical metaphor and textual metaphor in the two languages,and conclude the degree of relativity inside the national culture.This paper is built on the research by domestic and international scholars of metaphor and its translation,looking at the corresponding degree when metaphor arise in the two languages at the same time,from perspectives of vocabulary and discourse,with synchronous contrasting of textual and translation.According to the classification by Lakoff,in lexical metaphor comparison,this paper intends to do some statistics about the original and the translation sentences of metaphor from three aspects:entity metaphor,spatial metaphor and structural metaphor.In each category,we will illustrate the correspondence,part-correspondence and non-correspondence metaphor of the original and the translation respectively,and at the same time analyze the cause in terms of physical and psychological similarity.In terms of textual metaphor comparison,under the guidance of some relevant textual metaphor study,this paper will start with the perspective of the translator’s translation strategies to explore the inner drive of translator’s choice about different translation strategies.And according to the characteristics of Japanese culture,we will speculate whether the strategies adopted by the translator can reproduce the author’s original metaphorical thinking in the readers’ mind.Mean while,this paper contains a more detailed corresponding rate statistics on the translation of metaphor,and through this way we can reflect the degree of corresponding in different fields of culture between China and Japan.On this basis,we will analyze the cause of correspondence of the metaphor between the original and the translation of frog from the perspective of cultural and natural geography.Culture factors include social custom,literature,religion,etc,and the natural aspects contain the similar or dissimilar geographical environment between the two countries.In addition,starting from the specific circumstance of this novel,this paper also elucidates the reason why there is a high degree of corresponding of metaphor in the frog.This paper argues that,since the metaphor correspondence is higher between the original and the translation of the novel frog,we can conclude that between the two kinds of language and culture,the mode of thinking,the values,as well as the cognitive characteristics are higher coincident to some extent.Furthermore,as for the strategies adopted by the translator in metaphor translation,through discussing the cause of its choice and being combined with the research of Japanese culture,literature and social background,we consider that this translation can reproduce the original author’s metaphor thought in principle,however,some annotations would be needed adding to the appropriate places that could assist the readers to understand the translation.