An Opinion Mining Approach To The Readers' Reception Of Translated Metaphors In Fortress Besieged

In tune with the insistent demand of “going global” for Chinese literature,the reception of target readers has become one of the crucial criteria to translation.In order to tackle the contradictory problem that the current Chinese literature translation is emerging inexhaustibly,while the effect of mass communication has not achieved its optimal reach,the reception research is also endowed with new research value and realistic significance.In the era of big data,it is viable for the readers of the source text and the target text to have a dialogue across time and space through data mining.Opinion mining is a research approach that aims to extract computational opinions and sentiment from natural language texts,to analyze users' viewpoint,feedback,attitude and personal sentiment.Therefore,with the innovative implement of Python opinion mining,the thesis examined the effect of metaphor translation in the English version of Fortress Besieged and the readers' reception of the translated metaphors,through a comparison of the sentiment polarity and opinions toward metaphors between Chinese and English readers,so as to provide enlightenment from the readers' perspective for metaphor translation and even literature translation.The empirical study was conducted with quantitative and qualitative research methods to probe into how the translated metaphors are received by the readers.To get first-hand information about readers' opinions on the source text and target text of Fortress Besieged,we gathered large-scale data of Chinese and English readers' comments from the Internet(such as Douban reading,Amazon,Twitters,etc.)through data crawling and pre-processing.Next,sentiment polarity classification was employed to obtain readers' sentimental tendencies,while attribute representation of opinion mined gained quick insight into the most prominent focus of readers related.Then targeting at the research questions,the thesis carried through a well-directedcomparative analysis and deductive discussion of the causes and inspiration.It is found that overall acceptance of English readers is quite positive,just slightly lower than that of Chinese readers.Data collected also reveal their prominent interest in the Chinese culture embodied in metaphors,character-related metaphors and metaphor translation.Target readers have relatively more negative tendency toward metaphor translation,especially reflected in loaded time-consuming effort and dissimilarities of metaphor effects.From the perspective of reception studies,this paper emphasizes the need to take into account the target readers' cognitive habitus and focus disposition in their translation process,by simultaneously playing the dual roles of source and target readers by imitating and reproducing the conceptual integration process.