A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor Translation In Chinese Company Profiles

Despite researches conducted to study company profile translations in the past few years,few scholars have ever extended their research to study the conceptual metaphors in company profiles.With the development of Corpus Linguistics,corpus software are frequently used in various researches on the basis of available or self-constructed corpus.However,scholars combining metaphor and translation to carry out corpus-based study are few and far between.This thesis tries to research on translation of conceptual metaphor in profiles of small or medium-sized companies in China.The first hand data,that is the corpus,consist of 50 Chinese corporation profiles and their translated versions and 50 English corporation profiles.First of all,the metaphors should be identified and annotated on the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson,and then a contrastive study has been conducted to find out the characteristics of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English company profiles.Secondly,taking results of contrastive study as a foundation and resorting to Newmark's translation criteria of informative and vocative texts,the author found three translation problems of conceptual metaphors in Chinese company profiles as well as the causes of those translation problems.Finally,three translation methods have been proposed on the basis of contrastive study and Newmark's translation procedures for metaphors.According to the corpus-based contrastive analysis,this thesis enumerates the characteristics of conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English company profiles,which are listed as follows:1)Chinese tends to use orientational metaphors in presenting a company's production capacity and its social status,English focuses on a company's products and operation.2)Entity metaphors are frequently used in Chinese company profiles to list the3)honors of company.This is a specific phenomenon in Chinese company profiles,but rarely appear in English company profiles.4)The proportion of the metaphors for product-related information in English company profiles is much higher than that in Chinese company profiles.5)Most personifications in Chinese company profile describe the specific situation of a company at present.Totally different,English company profiles use a large quantity of personification not only to reflect the relationship between a company and its clients,but also to show a company's future-oriented thoughts and values.6)In terms of structural metaphors,the most obvious difference is that the FOUNDATION METAPHOR commonly used in English company profiles briefly reflects the importance that the a corporation attaches to its customers,products and values.It has been proved that three problems are prevalent in translation of conceptual metaphor in Chinese corporation profiles: 1)undertranslation of conceptual metaphors,2)inaccurate and word-for-word translation of conceptual metaphors,3)adherence to Chinese linguistic norms.From the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this thesis summarizes three causes of those problems: 1)translation on superficial level;2)the gap between translator's perception and the reality within the target language;and 3)culture specificity of conceptual metaphors.In order to tackle those translation problems,three methods have been proposed:1)recreating new metaphors in target language;2)substituting with similar target metaphors with the same sense;and 3)retaining sense contained in metaphor.