On The Translation Of Metaphors In Louis Cha’s The Deer And The Cauldron

Researchers have started to view metaphors from a cognitive perspective since the 1980s when Lakoff s Metaphors We Live By was published.This also brought new light upon translation studies of metaphors.Metaphor is no longer viewed as merely a rhetorical device.It constitutes an important part of our cognitive ability.This cognitive approach enlarges the scope of metaphors,and suggests that metaphors are ubiquitous and based on people’s experience.Some experience is shared by different cultures,others not.This means different cultures may share the same metaphors,while having distinctive ones to express the same thing.The difference in metaphorical expressions poses a question to translators:whether they should preserve the metaphorical image in the source language to achieve the so-called "faithfulness",at the cost of causing difficulty to target language readers,or they should adopt domestication approaches that enable target language readers to understand better by replacing or omitting the metaphorical image?The Deer and the Cauldron is the last work of Louis Cha,who is one of the most famous and productive writers of Wuxia(martial arts)novels.The Deer and the Cauldron was adapted into different films and dramas,and has become a household name in China.This work is also metaphorical,in many ways.Renowned translators,Pro.Minford and Pro.Hawkes,published the only English version of this novel,ten years after they translated The Story of the Stone,another Chinese great work.This thesis aims to summarize strategies for metaphor translation and when to use them.It is a descriptive study,taking both quantitative and qualitative approaches.It collects metaphors from the novel,which is at the end of the thesis.One translation strategy is assigned to each metaphor in the corpus for calculating the proportion of each translation strategy.In addition to statistical analysis,the thesis includes case studies on particular metaphors to account for the choices translators make.The thesis discovers that the choice of translation strategy is related to the text type,its function,purpose and literary effects,the context,etc.When the text is informative,domestication approaches are adopted to translate metaphors.When the text is expressive,the translator seeks to recover the expressiveness and the image of the metaphor.If the image of a metaphor carries cultural information,then the translator may adopt compensation strategies to restore the image,even at the expense of readability.