A Conceptual Metaphorical Approach To The Metaphor Translation In The Garlic Ballads By Howard Goldblatt

Metaphor exists in every aspects of our daily life as a linguistic phenomenon and it has traditionally been viewed as a rhetorical method.Therefore,most of the researches on metaphor translation are from the perspective of rhetoric.Until 1980,Lakoff and Johnson put forward the conceptual metaphor theory in the book The Metaphor We Live By,which provided a new perspective for the study of metaphor and its translation.Mo Yan is the first Chinese Nobel laureate in literature.The Garlic Ballads is a novel written by Mo Yan in 1988 that reflects the conscience of Chinese writers and the living conditions of vulnerable groups.It has received extensive attention from academic circles at home and abroad.At present,many scholars have studied The Garlic Ballads and its English translation from many perspectives,but few scholars have tried to study it from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.This thesis is based on the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson,and takes English translation version of The Garlic Ballads by Howard Goldblatt as research subject.It attempts to summarize the translation principles and rules through analyzing the translation strategy from the aspects of ontological metaphor,orientational metaphor and structural metaphor.This thesis finds that when dealing with ontological metaphors,the translator mainly adopted the strategy of “translating it into the same metaphor”;when dealing with orientational metaphors,the translator's principle strategy was “translating it into non-metaphors”,that is paraphrasing it;and about structural metaphors,the translator retained the original metaphors in most cases.In general,the translator rarely chose the “deletion” strategy,which only accounting for about 13% of the total.Over the years,many prestigious scholars at home and abroad have put forward and emphasized the translation theory of faithfulness.However,Howard Goldblatt made innovations which broke the long-held conventional view,provided a new perspective to review the nature and connotation of literary translation and laid emphasis on the creativity and subjectivity of translators.Howard Goldblatt's translation greatly promoted the Chinese culture to the world which is worthy of more studies.