A Study Of Strategies For The English Translation Of Metaphors In Lao She’s Li Hun

According to cognitive linguistics,although metaphor is traditionally known as an indispensable rhetorical device,it is in essence a common way of human thinking characterized by understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another.However,despite the universality of metaphor as a way of thinking,it is language and culture-specific at the same time: that is,a metaphorical mapping existing in one language does not necessarily have the same mapping in a different language.Therefore,cross-language conversion of metaphor in various types of texts,including novels,becomes a challenging but significant subject in translation studies and practices.However,in the previous studies,researchers used to confine metaphor translation studies to local contexts(such as specific words or sentences)and overlook the function played by metaphors in discourse construction to some extent,thus failing to make a relatively comprehensive observation of metaphor translation.Such researches are obviously not thorough especially when it comes to the translation of metaphors in long texts like novels.In addition,in terms of research methods,previous studies usually analyzed metaphor translation strategies in a source language-oriented approach by just proceeding from the source text(ST)to the target text(TT)rather than making an observation from the perspective of the TT.In view of this,based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT)proposed by Lakoff and Johnson(1980),this thesis takes Lao She’s novel Li Hun and its English translation The Quest for Love of Lao Lee as the data sources,divides metaphors into discourse metaphors and non-discourse metaphors and conducts a more comprehensive two-way analysis of metaphor translation,hoping to investigate the strategies adopted to translate metaphors in a novel as a complete text.The major findings are as follows.Firstly,in terms of the translation of discourse metaphors,the translator adopts the following three translation strategies listed here in the order of frequency: identical reproduction of metaphor(86.48%),conversion of metaphor to sense(10.14%)and replacement of metaphor(3.38%).Secondly,in terms of the translation of non-discourse metaphors,although the above-mentioned translation strategies generally show a similar distribution,it is worth noting that 63.81% of non-discourse metaphors are identically retained in the TT,which is much lower than discourse metaphors(86.48%);meanwhile,up to 28.57% of non-discourse metaphors in the ST are converted into non-metaphorical expressions while only 10.14% of discourse metaphors are converted into non-metaphorical wordings in the TT.The possible reasons for the above differences are as follows.Since discourse metaphors have the function of promoting the coherence and theme construction of novels,the translator frequently retains these metaphors as much as possible in the TT,so that they can not only faithfully reproduce the literary image created by the writer,but also retain the coherence featuring the ST.Comparatively speaking,non-discourse metaphors make a less impact on the coherence of the TT,thus the cost incurred in converting the ST metaphors into non-metaphorical expressions in the TT is relatively small.Therefore,as for non-discourse metaphors with strong language and culture specificity,the translator can handle them by turning them into non-metaphorical expressions appropriately to ensure the readability of the translation.