A Chinese-English Comparative Study Of He An In Political Language From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Since 1970 s,metaphor has no longer been viewed as a way to modify the language,but also a way of thinking mode,an important tool for human beings to understand the world.The development of cognitive study of metaphor in linguistic area has led its research to the development of metaphor translation.The translation of metaphor in literary work has great impact on its quality of the translation of the whole work.As for the translator of He An,Howard Goldblatt,he is the most prominent translator,whose translation works are the largest in contemporary Chinese translation literature field.The paper chooses Su Tong's He An,published in 2009 and translated in 2010 as the research subject,does the research based on the conceptual metaphor theory put forward by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,in which the present author adopts the qualitative and quantitative methods,trying to sum up the translation strategies Goldblatt uses in the English version.The analysis part of the conceptual metaphor is constructed by three dimensions,that is,structural metaphor,ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor,in which the present author does the research in the typical political languages in He An.With regard to the structural metaphor,the paper studies the most particular symbol spaces,“He” and “An” space systems;ontological metaphor studies reflect by the studies in the political languages and idioms;orientational metaphor is about the “Up-Down” system towards status in He An.By studying Goldblatt' s translation motivations,the present author found that the translations of metaphors to a large extent are based on the translator's cognitive cultural experiences and the cultural context,literary context,and context of co-text.In the English version,for the political language the translator almost adopts the domestication strategy since the particular social and political background;with regard to idioms,translator employs foreignization strategy to a large extent;and the more the cognitive cultural experiences between these two cultures overlap,the more possibility of the metaphor can be transplanted.Goldblatt also rewrites the original text to some extent to adapt to the target readers.The study of the conceptual metaphors of He An in this paper is mainly confined in the political languages.There may be some omissions of the examples of the metaphors in thispaper.But the paper also has some contributions and innovations.The paper enriches the domestic metaphor translation study,especially the study of conceptual metaphors in contemporary literature translation.On the other hand,the present paper is the first paper to do the comparison study of He An between Chinese and English version.Beside,it is the first paper to do the research in political language from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.At the same time,the present author gives some suggestions to improve the translations of metaphors in He An so as to transfer as much as cultural connotations of metaphor images to the target reader.In conclusion,the present paper lays the important foundation for the further study of the comparison research of He An.