A Contrastive Study Of Two English Versions Of The Images In Su Shi's Ci-poems In Light Of Conceptual Metaphor

Metaphor is a universal phenomenon in language.Different language systems contain different metaphor systems.The advance of cognitive studies claims that metaphor is not only a figurative device as regarded by the traditional views,but a way of cognition.The psychological working mechanism of metaphor is the mapping between the two conceptual domains: the source and target ones.Its essence is using one specific concept to understand another abstract concept.Classical Chinese poetry is a precious treasure of the Chinese literature,added up by ingenious images,many of which are metaphors.It is true that there are similarities and differences in metaphor systems across languages.Therefore,it's worth a study on whether a translation of metaphor bridges the source text and the target reader.With this in view,the study,taking Su Shi's ci-poems as an example,aims at finding out the cognitive similarities and differences between Xu Yuanchong's version and Julie Landau's version on the images in Su Shi's ci-poems.A contrastive study of 15 translations by Xu Yuanchong and Julie Landau of the same 15 poems comes to the major findings as follows:There are 203 images in 15 of Su Shi's ci-poems involved in this study,of which 60 are metaphors.According to the categorization of conceptual metaphors,these images fall into orientational metaphor,ontological metaphor,and structural metaphor in different distributional trends.It is also found that in Xu's version,metaphor-metaphor translation accounts for 25%,metaphor-plain expressions for 73% and metaphor-nothing for 2%.In contrast,in Landu's version,metaphor-metaphor translation accounts for 7%,metaphor-plain expressions for 81%and metaphor-nothing for 12%.The difference indicates that Xu rendered more metaphors into equivalent metaphors,hence more subjectivity.And a detailed analysis of the cognitive construction between the source domain and the target domain suggests that Xu's version builds a more direct bridge between the source and target texts in the metaphorical conceptual domains,i.e.,a better mapping is constructed.By so doing,it would be more readily intelligible to the target readers,and more conceptual,poetic and cultural elements of the original work are rendered into the target text.