Frame Theory And Interpretation Of Metaphors

Metaphor has always been a fundamental cognitive approach for human being.Metaphor is everywhere in our daily life.Metaphor is not just a form of language but,in a deep sense,a kind of cognitive mechanism,organizing the mind,shaping the judgement and structuring the language.With the deepening cultural exchanges between the East and West,interpretation of metaphors is an accurate way to achieve cross-cultural communication and it has become more and more important in cultural research due to its complexity and particularity.Frame Theory was proposed by Goffman in 1974 and then applied to study metaphor in linguistic research.Later,it plays a significant role in Linguistic.According to Frame Theory,when getting the same concept,those who are under the same frame will have the same scene in their mind while those who are not under the same frame will have different scenes.In the foreign aid project undertaken by Hunan Department of Commerce,the author provided liaison interpretation service when foreign guests appreciating Hunan Flower-drum Opera.It involves a bunch of metaphors including proverb,folk adage and two-part allegorical saying.If these metaphors are interpreted in a wrong way,the audience will misunderstand them.Align with Frame theory,the author selected 20 representative cases from the liaison interpreting task of appreciation of Hunan Flower-drum Opera.In the thesis,with the approach of Case Analysis,the author analyzed problems when interpreting metaphor and their reasons.Through case analysis,the author raised respective coping strategies,such as keeping the vehicle,converting to the corresponding vehicle,adding explanation and adding the vehicle.The author hopes that this thesis could play a role in and make some contributions for metaphor interpretation research.The results show that if the interpreter and the audience are in the same source domain,the understanding of the metaphor with the source domain is the same or similar,and the interpreter can choose to retain the vehicle to interpret.If the two are in different source domains,the understanding of metaphor may be different,or there is no similar metaphor in the target language.In this case,free translation or adding vehicle should be adopted to help the target language audiences understand the meaning.