Money Proverbs In English And Chinese:A Conceptual Metaphorical Account

Money,which witnesses the course of human history and promotes the social and economic development,has changed its form from original equivalent exchange of cowhide,wool,pork into many kinds of portable shells and coppers.So far,money can even become a symbol of socio-economic civilization of countries and promote transcultural communication.Throughout all ages,proverbs about money are developed and spread in Chinese and English.In terms of that Chinese and English proverbs of money cohere the essence of the two cultures so that they are always considered by linguistic scholars as means to figure out the impact and differences of the core culture between Chinese and English.Metaphors We Live by published by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 suggested that“Metaphor is not just a matter of language.The human processes are largely metaphorical.This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined”.According to their theory,the thesis will compare the semantic and syntactic differences between Chinese and English money proverbs in terms of conceptual metaphor system to express the difference in the liquidity and forces of money.According to Zoltan's theoretical framework of "The Power of Money," the thesis will be divided into three parts,including "Money is a Liquid," "Money is a Force" and "Cognitive and Cultural Factors" to support above two parts.Finally,this thesis will use the Chinese Proverbs Dictionary,The American English Slang Dictionary,the Beijing Language and Culture University Modern Chinese Corpus and other platforms to quote a sufficient amount of proverbs about money as a corpora support to reflect the "Liquidity" and "Forces" in these proverbs.Water,which exists in every corner of the earth,is an important resource for all life,and it's the most important part of living things.Water also carries human's cultural development and historical processes in its eternal fluidity and complex and varied forms.Both money and water play an important part in people's life and variouskinds of proverbs about money are created by human beings.There is no doubt that money promotes the development of human society and benefits human life.However,if it is used carelessly,it will also bring a great disaster to human society.As the characteristics of money are similar to water,this paper will start from the "liquidity" of water.Based on the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor,the "liquidity" and "variability" of money will be analyzed on the basis of Chinese and English proverbs about money.With the development of human society,the role of money is more and more important.From state affairs to family trifles,money matters in every way and its power is beyond human imagination.Combining with sufficient proverbs corpus on money and using the conceptual metaphor as the framework,the paper analyzes how the proverbs of money express its "power" from the six aspects including Social Cause,Desire Cause,Source Cause,Essential Condition Cause,Negative condition Cause and Multiplication Cause.As the translation between Chinese and English proverbs has always been the research focus and interest of Chinese and Western translators,this paper runs through the translation of relevant proverbs between English and Chinese.In many examples of this thesis,each Chinese proverb will be translated into English through transliteration,literal translation and free translation,and English proverbs will be translated literally and translated into Chinese,which aims to find out the differences of the translation of the proverbs of money and also it is also an effective way to analyze the "liquidity" and "power" of money in proverbs.In the process of processing English-Chinese translation,changes are generated which are called the change of parataxis and hypotaxis in the field of translation,thus the "liquidity" and "power" of money will be changed accordingly.Focusing on these changes,it is quite necessary to study how conceptual metaphor theory works in the process compared with thousands of other translations,and it is where the novelty of this paper lies comparing with other researches on conceptual metaphor.