The Cross-cultural Construction Of The Interpersonal Meaning Of Mood Metaphors

Mood embodies interpersonal meaning,that is,the social role,status,position,viewpoint,mentality and personality of a character,as well as the discourse power relations between characters."Mood metaphor" refers to the incongruent association of the mood of a sentence with its speech function,a variant form of expression that embodies rich interpersonal meaning.Due to the differences between the Chinese and English languages and cultures in terms of phraseology,ideology,writing norms,sociocultural and historical backgrounds,mood metaphors constitutes a thorny problem in analyzing,comprehending,and,ultimately,translating them in a cross-cultural context.The Ides of Marche an epistolary fiction by Thornton Wilder,abounds with characters' speech,the mood and interpersonal meaning of which poses a daunting challenge for the translator in respect of its comprehension and cross-cultural construction.The mood metaphor theory of M.A.K Halliday,therefore,helps with the Chinese translation of the speech in The Ides of March by enabling the translator to precisely analyze and recognize the actual speech function underlying the mood,fully understand the interpersonal meaning as conveyed in the original,and then cross-culturally construe equivalent interpersonal meaning,especially with regard to the subtlety and complexity involved,in a way that meets the norms of the target language.This thesis argues,through the implementation and dissection of the English-Chinese translation project,that the translator should,ideally,retain the original mood metaphor if it communicates equivalent interpersonal meaning in the target text;otherwise,considering the linguistic and cultural differences,the translator should,when necessary,add mood adjuncts,conduct semantic amplification,alter the original mood domain,create a different metaphor or use the congruent form instead to cross-culturally construct equivalent interpersonal meaning in the target text.