A Study Of The Translation Strategies Of Metaphors In Literature

Chinese metaphors often carry abundant cultural information,so how to translate them faithfully has,for a long time,been a challenge as well as a hot issue in translation studies.Additionally,literary metaphors are often characterized by specific features of the literary works and personal writing style of the writer,which makes the translation of these metaphors more difficult in translation practices.On the other hand,there are many translation strategies put forward aiming at solving the problem.Among them,the seven strategies put forward by Peter Newmark and another four ones posed by Gideon Toury are comparatively systematic and inclusive.Thus this thesis,on the basis of the two theories,concludes altogether five strategies of translating literary metaphors:transliteration,transplantation,converting metaphor to sense,reproducing the same image plus sense,and metaphor into 0This thesis aims to investigate the applicability of these five strategies in translating literary metaphors through a case-study of English translation of the fifteenth chapter of The Criminal Lu Yanshi.The study has shown that among all the five-strategies transliteration is the easiest to apply,but there is a high possibility that it will lead to the problem of dead translation,and that because of cultural differences translators can also convey wrong meanings despite retaining the same images;although transplantation can compensate the deficiency of the previous strategy,it requires that translators should be excellent in both languages and quite familiar with two distinctive cultures;converting metaphor to sense can,to a large extent,make the target text smooth and clear yet at the cost of losing the stylistic features of the source text;reproducing the same image plus sense emphasizes both faithfulness and acceptability of the target text,but it should be based on the premise that both original readers and target readers are quite familiar with the images;metaphor into 0 has the same merit as transplantation,but as there will be a heavy loss in stylistic features and pragmatic meanings,translators should be careful when applying the strategy.