A Study On English Translation Of Metonymic Idioms In Shifu,You'll Do Anything For A Laugh Under The View Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Idiom,the language form,exists in different cultures.This endows idioms with rich historical and cultural backgrounds.Idioms consist of several words,and they can be divided into set phrases,proverbs,mottos,slangs and etc.Traditional linguistics views idioms as conventional fixed expressions.Studies on idioms from cognitive aspect focus on the composability and analyzability of idioms and view metaphor and metonymy as two mechanisms that motivate the generation and readers' cognition of idioms(Lakoff,1987:130).The focus of the thesis is the idioms with metonymy being the cognitive mechanism,which is also called metonymic idioms,so as to study the understanding and translation of idioms from the aspect of metonymic mechanism.Metonymy is a rhetorical device whose effect is to enrich the artistic quality of literary works.Metonymy is not only a rhetorical device but also a cognitive mode.Cognitive mode is the mode of obtaining and processing information.People have some similar or different cognitive modes because of different cultural backgrounds.The common points of these cognitive modes provide possibility for metonymic translation between different languages,and the differences between the cognitive modes make it different for the readers in different nations to understand the same metonymy.Proper translation principles are needed by translators,so as to correctly embody the metonymic concept with different cultural characteristics in the translated text.Conceptual integration theory is proposed on the basis of mental space theory.Conceptual integration commonly relates to four metal spaces,which are two input spaces,one generic space and one blended space(Fauconnier&Turner,1997:87).Two input spaces project to the generic space so as to reflect the common abstract structure,and then the generic space regulates the mappings between the two input spaces and projects the elements in the two input spaces selectively to the blended space to generate emergent structure by three processes of “composition”,“completion” and “elaboration”(Fauconnier and Turner,2002:48).“Composition” is to compose together the elements projected to the blended space from the input spaces,“completion” is to complete the composed elements with the help of background information,and the “elaboration” is to well-process the elements processed in the “completion” step.Mo Yan is the first Chinese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Shifu,You'llDo Anything for a Laugh is one of the medium-length novel collected in his novel collection of the same name.The translated text for reference in the thesis is the English version by American translator Sir Howard Goldblatt.Sir Howard Goldblatt is a famous translator of Chinese literary works.He translates more than sixty novels from more than thirty authors,and he is the main English translator of Mo Yan's novels.The thesis takes conceptual integration theory as the theoretical frame and takes Goldblatt's translated version of Mo Yan's novel Shifu,You'll Do Anything for a Laugh as the corpus to analyze the feasibility and explanatory power of applying conceptual integration theory in analyzing the English translation of metonymic idioms and discuss the principles and inspirations of English translation of metonymic idioms in Shifu,You'll Do Anything for a Laugh under the guide of conceptual integration theory.Case analyses and studies show that it is feasible to apply conceptual integration theory to study the English translation of metonymic idioms in Shifu,You'll Do Anything for a Laugh and conceptual integration theory has good explanatory power in analyzing the translation of metonymic idioms in Shifu,You'll Do Anything for a Laugh.For the English translation of metonymic idioms that can be well-understood by readers of source and target languages,the principle of literal translation can be adopted.For the English translation of metonymic idioms being different in interpretations by readers of source and target languages,the principle of adopting the unique metonymic vehicle in target language can be adopted.For the English translation of metonymic idioms unique to readers of source language,the principle of translating the ideal meaning of the source text can be adopted.