A Research On Metonymy Translation From The Cognitive Linguistics

Traditionally,metonymy has been taken as a figure of speech peculiar to literature language.However,ever since the cognitive turn of metonymy study in 1980,metonymy has been widely regarded as a means of cognition and a pattern of thinking.In essence,it is more a basic human cognition of abstract ideas than a language phenomenon.The cognitive turn of metonymy research is initiated by Lakoff and Johnson,who in their joint seminal work Metaphors We Live By devote one chapter exclusively to the study of metonymy,putting forward important insights that metonymy has the function of understanding and is based on human experience.Thereafter,a new angle is provided for scholars to further their study on metonymy.Despite various definitions of metonymy raised by different linguists,a shared understanding among them is that metonymy itself is conceptual,which is more fundamental than metaphor.And due to its ubiquitousness and close relatedness to translation,the approach from the cognitive linguistics to metonymy research sheds new light on metonymy translation.Du Fu,the great realistic poet and master poet in the Tang Dynasty,is known as the Sage Poet.His poems,succinct in language and rich in contents,contain wealthy Chinese traditional culture,which are gems of the Chinese literature treasure-house,hence having great research value.Although the translated works of his poems have been studied from many perspectives,the scholarly papers from the cognitive metonymy are not fruitful.In this thesis,the cognitive metonymy theory absorbs what is best from different linguists in terms of the nature and working mechanism of metonymy and adopts the relatively more thorough classification of metonymy raised by Radden and Kovecses.And in considering of the cultural distinctiveness of poems,another classification,metonymy related to culture,is added to better undergo the metonymy research on Du Fu's poems and the equivalent English translation of Xu Yuanzhong.This thesis takes the metonymies in Du Fu's poems and the equivalent English translation in Selected Poems of Du Fu translated by Xu Yuanzhong as the research object from the cognitive metonymy.Specifically,it classifies the metonymy phenomena in the original poems and examines the translation strategies in Xu's translation.It turns out that metonymy is quite common in Du Fu's poems,which mainly includes Thing-and-Part ICM Metonymy,Category-and-Property ICM Metonymy,Event ICM Metonymy,Causation ICM Metonymy,Production ICM Metonymy,Location ICM Metonymy,Allusion Metonymy and Image Metonymy.With respect to the strategies for Xu's metonymy translation,the thesis arrives at the conclusions: first,liberal translation should be given the first priority with literal translation being the secondary one,in which preserving the metonymic target in translation contributes most to conveying the original meaning and style of the source text to the foreign readers despite some unavoidable problems of cultural unequivalence and cultural loss;second,the metonymy translation is greatly affected by the cultural exclusiveness.When the metonymy models share common points between Chinese and English,the metonymic vehicle can be retained.Otherwise,the vehicle has to be replaced.In addition,during the analysis of cognition process and metonymy translation,this thesis concludes that preserving the metonymic target in translation should be regarded as the dominant translation strategy except that some explanatory note should be added to bridge the gap between cultures when necessary.