On Wind And Rain Metaphors And Their Translations In Shakespeare's And Cao Yu's Plays From The Perspective Of Experiential Cognition

Through constant interaction with weather conditions and based on the knowledge and experience of weather,people structure and conceptualize the world through weather metaphors.Cao Yu and Shakespeare are the famous playwrights respectively in China and Britain.Wind and rain are used and are connected with metaphorical expressions in their plays.Based on the previous studies,the thesis uses the four tragedies of Shakespeare and Cao Yu's Thunderstorm,Sunrise and Wilderness as the text,making statistical analysis of wind and rain expressions in these plays with the help of the corpus software antconc3.2.0w and concludes their language features from the rhetorical perspective.It is found that wind and rain metaphors are realized by such rhetorical devices as simile,metaphor and functional metaphor,and they present different features in linguistic forms.On the whole,Shakespeare is more flexible than Cao Yu in the metaphorical use of wind and rain.With the development of cognitive linguistics,metaphor is not only regarded as a means of rhetoric,but also a cognitive way.The thesis makes a thorough analysis of wind and rain metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and tries to explore the similarities and differences of mapping in the plays of Shakespeare and Cao Yu.It is found that in terms of metaphorical mapping,there are many instances related to wind and rain images which are projected into different target domains,including:behavioral domains,such as MANNER IS WIND etc;social phenomena domains,such as SITUATION/TREND IS WIND etc;emotional domains,such as TEAR,SORE/BLAME IS RAIN and so on.Meanwhile,in the process of conceptualization,various characteristics of wind and rain led to different expressions.Shakespeare and Cao Yu have their own metaphorical projections.The unique metaphorical mappings in Shakespeare's plays are:RUMOR IS WIND,MUSIC IS WIND and SORE/SHAME IS RAIN.The unique metaphorical mappings in Cao's are:TIREDNESS IS WIND,SHOCK/POWER IS WIND and POVERTY IS WIND.In general,wind and rain metaphors in the plays of Shakespeare and Cao Yu reflect the feature of cognition——universality and cultural uniqueness.Conceptual metaphor theory has a strong explanatory power and has been applied in translation studies.Conceptual metaphor is a mapping from one conceptual domain to another.From the perspective of conceptual metaphor,the translation view of metaphor can also be understood as a mapping from the source domain(source language)to the target domain(target language).From the view of conceptual metaphor translation theory,the thesis makes an objective description of the existing Chinese version of Shakespeare's plays(respectively by Zhu Shenghao,Liang Shiqiu,Bian Zhillin and Fang Ping)and the English version of Cao Yu's plays Sunrise(by Barnes and Wang Zuoliang)and Thunderstorm(by Barnes)and concludes three translation methods of wind and rain metaphors:complete corresponding,partial corresponding and total reconstruction.As an interdisciplinary endeavor,this study combines the theory of conceptual metaphor,rhetoric and translation,makes a comparison of wind and rain metaphors,carries out a cognitive analysis from the perspective of cognitive experience and concludes three translation strategies,which is conducive to exploring new ways for the study of language and translation of the plays of Shakespeare and Cao Yu.