C-E Translation Report On Intellectual Revolution(Excerpts):Difficulties In And Tactics For Translating Cultural Metaphors

This report is based on the stimulated C-E translation project of the popular scientific text Intellectual Revolution.The text depicts the upcoming intelligent society from the aspects like deep learning,unmanned vehicle and big data,and reviews the challenges faced by human beings with the combination of the technological status of AI in China.This project aims to make humble contribution to China’s international discourse power in AI field and improve personal translation skills.In Intellectual Revolution,metaphors are frequently adopted to clearly elaborate the AI development and vividly explain the complicated technical terms or issues However,there are great cultural and cognitive differences between Chinese and English,and these differences make the cultural metaphor translation in Intellectual Revolution become a difficulty.And in this report,this difficulty is classified into:(1)difficulty in translating cultural metaphors with inequivalent vehicle images;(2)difficulty in translating cultural metaphors with missing vehicle images.According to Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory,when translating metaphors,translators should not only pay attention to language conversion to convey the information of the source text accurately but focus on the equivalence of perceptual mapping to rebuild and represent the profound thinking pattern hidden in the metaphor.Based on this theory,we put forward two translation tactics to solve the above two difficulties:(1)transferring vehicles to make English readers have similar cognitive experience;(2)translating vehicles literally and adding annotation to represent the original perceptual mapping and increase readability of the translated version.