Research On The Translation Of Metaphors Of Wushu Weapons Based On Jin Yong’s Martial Arts Fictions

Chinese wushu weapons are the core of traditional Chinese martial arts,and the idioms and sayings produced during their development and evolution contain rich metaphorical meanings.However,due to the lack of corresponding conceptual prototypes of Chinese wushu weapons among heterogeneous cultures,cultural absences are prone to occur in the process of C-E translation,resulting in the unique connotation and national cultural characteristics of martial arts culture not being deeply explored.At present,there is little attention to this phenomenon,and the C-E translation of metaphors of wushu weapons is even more less.This study takes the conceptual metaphor theory as the theoretical framework,and builds a 4-million parallel corpus of Jin Yong’s martial arts fictions,covering the Chinese-English bilingual corpus texts of Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain translated by Olivia Mok,Legends of the Condor Heroes translated by Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang,The Book and the Sword translated by Graham Earn Shaw,and The Deer and the Cauldron translated by John Minford.In the parallel corpus of Jin Yong’s martial arts fictions,idioms and sayings related to wushu weapons culture are retrieved,and the mutual information score in antconc 3.5.9 is used to analyze the lexical collocation and use context of idioms,sayings and other discourse expressions of metaphors of wushu weapons.The translation method of metaphors of wushu weapons in Jin Yong’s martial arts fictions is interpreted and discussed from three dimensions: embodied cognition,syntactic iconicity and image schema.The main findings of this study are as follows: First,the word frequency related to the “broadsword” metaphor is much higher than that of other weapon metaphors.Second,there are three ways to deal with the source domain of wushu weapons,namely,retaining,concealing and replacing with superordinates,among which the method of concealing the source domain of wushu weapons has the highest proportion in the C-E translation.Third,translation methods of literal translation,free translation,delete translation,omission and the combination of literal translation and free translation in the C-E translation of metaphors of wushu weapons,among which free translation takes the highest proportion in the five translation methods.This study aims to interpret the metaphorical connotation in the culture of wushu weapons,effectively convey the profound meaning reflected by Chinese wushu weapons to the target language audience,and provide reference and enlightenment for the C-E translation of Chinese martial arts.