A Study On The Proverbs In Shakespeare's Plays And Their Chinese Translations In The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

As an important cultural and language phenomenon,proverbs have been well concerned by scholars at home and abroad.However,most of the existing studies mainly discuss the understanding and translation of some proverbs from the perspective of traditional linguistics.And lack deep analysis of the cultural background and the reflected cultural patterns.In addition,the contradistinctive analysis of proverbs,that is,the contradistinctive study of proverbs from different languages is rare.At present,the research on proverb itself is relatively few.Therefore,it is of great significance to conduct this research in the way of combining conceptual metaphor with the proverbs in Shakespeare' s plays.The research takes the four tragedies and comedies as the source of the proverbs,analyzes the metaphorical cognition of the proverbs,and their translations.First of all,because of the differences between English and Chinese,this research gives an all-sided explanation on the definition of the proverb,and classifies the proverbs in these plays.Conceptual metaphor holds the opinion that the proverbs are the product of our conceptual system.They were not just only linguistic or lexical problems,what important is that they came from our understanding of the world,and the understanding embodied in the whole conceptual system(??,2005).Therefore,as a special linguistic phenomenon,the proverbs also had their own metaphorical cognitive mechanism.Through the cognitive analysis on the metaphorical cognition,metaphor types and the semantic cognition of the proverbs in these plays,this thesis find out that the conceptual metaphor could be helpful to understand the cultural connotation the proverbs contain from different cultural perspectives,and appreciate the infinite charm and artistic appeal of the proverbs.Second,the thesis conducts a contradistinctive analysis on the five translators 'translations of the proverbs in these plays from the perspective of equity mapping and excursion equivalence,and find out that as for the understanding of the same abstract things,people usually choose the same angle of view to understand.For this sort of metaphor,the translators can achieve the goal of equity mapping translation according to the same mental cognitive mechanism of the readers of both the original and the translation.As for those cultural images that the readers of the translation do not understand,the equity mapping translation and supplemental explanation could not work out the best effects.While the excursion equivalence mapping translation is more convenient for the readers to understand,because it reserves the original information,embodies the aesthetic value and facilitates the communication between Chinese and English.