A Study On Interpreting Strategies Of War Metaphors At The Chinese Premiers’ Press Conferences

From a cognitive perspective,metaphor is a critical tool for people to understand the world.“Argument is war” is a typical war metaphor.The characteristics of the war concept are systematically projected in the mapping process,which highlight the conflicts and confrontation of things under discussion.In Modern Chinese discourse,war metaphor is ubiquitous,as well as in political discourse.At present,researches on war metaphor mainly focus on the reasons for its generalization,benefits and drawbacks.From the perspective of cross-cultural communication,there is few research on the interpreting of war metaphors in Chinese political discourse.When the war metaphor appears in political discourse,especially in political diplomatic discourse,it should be interpreted more cautiously because of its conflict nature.Therefore,it is of significance to study the war metaphor interpreting in Chinese political diplomatic discourse.The Chinese Premier’s Press Conference is an important occasion for the Chinese government to interpret its policies and state its position internationally.This paper collects the videos and texts of the premiers’ answers in Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences from2003 to 2020 as the corpus.With Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory(1980)and the Political Equivalence + Image Re-presentation proposed by Yang Mingxing(2020)as the guide,this paper analyzes how interpreters deal with war metaphors.The interpreting strategies of war metaphors are summarized;whether and how interpreters mediate the conflict and confrontation associations reflected by war metaphors are analyzed according to the changes of war images before and after interpreting.It is found that the interpreters adopt two interpreting strategies,namely keeping image and omitting image.No matter what strategy interpreters adopt,the Political Equivalence is achieved;what’s more,interpreters mitigate the confrontational associations by omitting the war images.In political diplomatic discourse,this study is of great significance of shaping national image;senior interpreters’ performance on interpreting war metaphors may provide guidance for learners to identify their roles in different situations,and also improve their interpreting performance.