A Contrastive Study On The Translation Of Color Term “Qing” In Two English Versions Of A Dream Of Red Mansions From Conceptual Metaphor Theory

A Dream of Red Mansions,the encyclopedia of Chinese culture,is the peak of the novels through the whole literary history in China.Researches about A Dream of Red Mansions at home and abroad are just unfolding.Besides many of these researches are about some traditional aspects like costumes,the form of address,poems and chapters,some focuses on some new perspectives like male homosexuality and color terms are also involved.The color terms are culture-loaded words;there’s a wide application of color terms in the book A Dream of Red Mansions.And besides,the expressions related to ambivalent color term “Qing” are also abundant in the book,including apparel,scenery and metaphorical allusion,etc.The translation of color term “Qing” is not just related to the lexicon level,but also the factors like cultural difference,metaphorical cognition and the context must be taken into consideration.As a result,the contrastive study about color term “Qing” in two English versions of A Dream of Red Mansions both have important theoretical value and practical meaning.Researches about color terms in A Dream of Red Mansions are a little bit prevalent in recent twenty years.However,compared with some other perspectives,researches about color terms are relatively very few.A Dream of Red Mansions contains a lot of rich and colorful Chinese culture which reflects from clothing accessories to social words.Color terms are also the carriers of the culture behind.The desires of the researches about color terms are mostly keen on color term of red series.In contrast,researches about other color terms are relatively scanty,especially like “Qing”classified into ambivalent category.The transference of color term in A Dream of Red Mansions through translation processing seems very important,because there are some huge differences of cognitions about colors between Eastern and Western cultures.Otherwise,misunderstandings would be created to readers for any carefulness.Metaphor is gradually breaking the restriction of literary rhetoric skill since Lakoff and Johnson put forward and distilled conceptual metaphor in the book Metaphors We Live By;the metaphor is more belonging to the perspective of philosophy,so to speak,metaphor is everywhere in people’s life.Almost every utterance is covered with the philosophical thinking of metaphor and metaphor is a type of cognitive means and way of thinking.Conceptual metaphor is classified into three types in the book Metaphors We Live By,structural metaphor,orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor.Briefly speaking,metaphor is the systematic mapping of cross conceptual domain.However,metaphors in different culture are not absolutely the same,because conceptual metaphor are rooted in culture and experience.A lot of difficulties are brought in the process of translation,so a new visual angle can be found in the research of translation,if the research starts from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.The thesis,based on understandings of A Dream of Red Mansions,hold a contrastive analysis of two translation versions of Hawkes and Yang Hsien-Yi to utilize Chinese-English parallel corpus for retrieval of translations of “Qing” in first eighty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions.And then,based on conceptual metaphor theories put forward in the book metaphors we live by,the contrastive analysis will be made for two English translation versions of A Dream of Red Mansions by Hawks and Yang Hsien-Yi through the perspective of conceptual metaphor theories.Through the contrastive study,the thesis found out that there are some similarities about the translation in two English versions.The similarities are in vehicles,metaphorical meanings and ground.In some cases,two versions are consistent in reach consensus in ground.However,the differences are greater than the similarities in two versions.The differences are into four situations: 1.The vehicles and metaphorical meanings are different;2.The vehicles are different;the metaphorical meanings are same;3.The choices for reserve or omission of color imagery in target domain;4.The vehicles and metaphorical meanings are different;the grounds are different.Through the contrastive analysis,the factors behind the distinction are these: 1.Language is an interaction between human cognition,body experience and the objective world;the vehicle differs in terms of human cognition;2.cultural differences determine human thoughts and one vehicle may not find another correspondence in other culture;3.Context is also an important factor influencing the translations;the color term “Qing” is a general reference for several colors but more complex under contextual limit.