A Study On The Approaches Of Translating Metaphors In Frog From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The thesis aims at probing into the approaches of translating metaphors in Frog.The metaphor has been a hot topic since the time of Aristotle.Metaphors in literature entail rich cultural background information and convey complicated connotative meanings.For these reasons,it is rather difficult for a translator to successfully render metaphors and manage to express connotative meanings.Relevance theory,put forward by Sperber and Wilson,argues that the nature of successful communication lies in cognition and inference,which provides a new insight to study the translation of metaphors.Taking Frog as a case study,the author makes a comparison of metaphors in both Chinese and English version and concludes that Goldblatt adopts four approaches to translate metaphors in Frog:retaining mappings,converting mappings,deleting mappings and creating mappings.Then,based on relevance theory,the thesis states the effects that Goldblatt achieves by applying these approaches of translating metaphors with the methodology of example analysis.By means of retaining and converting mappings,Goldblatt achieves the presentation of adequate contextual effects in the translation;by means of deleting mappings,although Goldblatt accomplishes successful communication,he fails to maintain poetic effects of metaphors as well as to reproduce adequate contextual effects;by means of creating mappings,Goldblatt,on the one hand,completes the representation of adequate contextual effects in the target language text,on the other hand,he manages to transmit Chinese cultural images to readers.Lastly,the author seeks to demonstrate a relevance-theoretic account of the approaches that Goldblatt adopts to translate metaphorical expressions in Frog.The acquisition of optimal relevance is the premise of translating metaphors.In the next place,Goldblatt is driven to apply the corresponding approaches to translate metaphors in accordance with the similarity,difference,and default of the cognitive environment between source language readers and target language receptors.Afterward,Goldblatt's intention also plays a significant role as well during the process of the translation of metaphors in Frog.In addition,Goldblatt also takes reader's inferential ability into consideration while rendering metaphors.The present research has come to a conclusion that Goldblatt tries his best to convey the optimal relevance when translating metaphors in Frog.Through the analysis,the author testifies that relevance theory holds strong explanatory power and feasibility for the translation of metaphors.Moreover,it is an expectation that this study is able to make a contribution to further researches on Goldblatt's translation and literary works full of metaphors.