On Julia Lovell’s C-E Translation Of Body Metaphors In Lu Xun’s Novels:A Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

The C-E translation of Chinese literary works,especially of those modern and contemporary Chinese fictions,has won worldwide attention from translators and scholars both at home and abroad.Among the modern Chinese writers,Lu Xun’s works have been translated most and studied most in the Western countries.Among the translated versions,The Real Story ofAh-Q and Other Tales of China by Julia Lovell was published by Penguin Classics in 2009.It is not only the most updated,but also the largest collection of Lu Xun’s works.There exist a large number of body metaphors in Lu Xun’s fictions.This research is intended to explore all the 33 fictions collected in Outcry,Hesitation and Old Stories Retold from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.The first step is to identify all the body metaphors in Lu Xun’s fictions by referring to their categories.The second step is to compare the target texts with the original texts in order to analyze what translation strategies Lovell employs in translation and the reasons behind.By combining the qualitative research method with the quantitative one,this research explores the body metaphors in Lu Xun’s fictions and Lovell’s translations.First and foremost,the qualitative method is employed to determine the definition and the classification models of the body metaphors.Then,the quantitative method is adopted to retrieve all the body part words related with "yan/mu"(eyes),"lian/mian"(face),"zui/kou"(mouth),"tou/shou"(head)and "xin"(heart).According to the classification models,the qualified body metaphors are identified and the distribution data of those metaphors in the three short story collections is obtained.Followed by an analysis on the acquired body metaphors,different types of SL body metaphors are detected and specified in terms of source domain and target domain.Finally,with a comparison between the source texts and Lovell’s translations,this research examines how Lovell translates the original body metaphors in the cognitive and linguistic aspects.Moreover,the reasons for her adopting one particular translation strategy instead of another are explored.This research draws the following conclusions.First,concerning the mapping models,the body metaphors in Lu Xun’s fictions are classified into three types,which are mapping from body domain to non-human domain,mapping from non-human domain to body domain and mapping with two body-part domains.As for the first type,the human body domain acts as the source domain,and the non-human domain as the target domain can either be concrete or abstract.As for the second type,the body domain is conversely changed to be the target domain,described by non-human domains like color and animal domains.The last type of the body metaphors involves two body parts.Different from the first two types,the third type is Chinese culture-specific.The culture-specific metaphors increase difficulties in metaphor translation due to the great cultural discrepancy between Chinese culture and Western culture.Second,Lovell adopts different translation strategies based on different cross-cultural mapping conditions.For those metaphors sanctioned by projection mappings where there is a particular source domain,Lovell tends to compare the semantic meaning of the original source domain with that of the English counterpart.Accordingly,the source domain can either be retained,altered,deleted or paraphrased.In addition,for those metaphors activated by image schemas,Lovell copies or shifts the schema in her translations.If such attempt fails,she alternatively paraphrases the original metaphor into a non-metaphor.Last but not least,the reasons for her adopting flexible translation strategies are as follows.On the one hand,for those culturally shared metaphors,Lovell copies the original mappings without any alteration.On the other hand,for those Chinese culture-specific metaphors whose mapping models are mismatched or vacant in the target culture,she takes linguistic and cultural distinctions of the target language into account.Thus,it can be concluded that in order to upgrade the readability of the translated works in the target culture,the translator balances between faithfulness and creation by retaining,altering,paraphrasing,or deleting the original metaphors.