A Study Of Interpreting Strategies Of Chinese Metaphors In C-E Interpretation From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

In consecutive interpreting,interpreters may encounter many metaphorical expressions quoted by the speakers.They need to comprehend them from their own life experience and then convey the exact intentions of the speakers to the target audience.According to the conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson,the process of one object reflecting another object,or the “source domain” reflecting the “target domain” is termed as “cross-domain mapping”(Lakoff & Johnson,1993),which is also the core of the conceptual metaphor theory.This author of this thesis,based on the conceptual metaphor theory by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,chooses the consecutive interpretation from one press conference in 2017 as research material and conducts a comparative analysis between five professional interpreters and ten student interpreters.The process of this experiment is as follows: Firstly,the student interpreters and the freelance interpreters are asked to do interpretation based on the given material;Then,the author will transcribe all their recordings and file the output of the interpreters;Next,the author will conduct a comparative analysis of the interpreting output of the student interpreters and the professional interpreters based on the three perspectives of the conceptual metaphor theory,i.e.structural metaphor,ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor.This paper tries to provide possible answers to the following questions:1.What kinds of interpreting strategies can be applied to interpret Chinese metaphorical expressions?2.What are the differences among professional interpreters and interpreting learners on the use of interpreting strategies to interpret Chinese metaphorical expressions?3.What suggestions on interpreting Chinese metaphors can we make forinterpreting teaching and practice?The following are the conclusions of the study: firstly,three kinds of interpreting strategies might be effective in avoiding ambiguities: literal translation,free translation and omission.Secondly,this study has found out that most student interpreters tend to adopt the strategy of free translation more frequently than literal translation and professional interpreters tend to adopt a combined strategy of literal translation and free translation.Finally,this paper has put forward some suggestions:the seriousness of mishandling metaphorical expressions in the process of interpretation should be emphasized and different contexts place different requirements on the use of interpreting strategies.