A Study Of English Translation Strategies Of Metaphor In Political Publicity Text

Recent years have seen that vigorous efforts were made by Chinese government to get more discourse power in the international arena and people from all over world would know China in a comprehensive and objective way.From this,political publicity text comes under the global spotlight.At present,studies on the translation of political publicity texts in China mainly are confined in functional equivalence theory,Skopos and manipulation theory,rarely involving in metaphor and its translation strategies.Metaphor is a type of psychological,linguistic,and cultural behavior as well as a cognitive method of thinking that exists everywhere.It is heavily used in the white paper and metaphor translation would be seen as a measuring equipment for the quality of translation and a booster for enhancement of translator’s ability.Furthermore,the research of metaphor translation in political publicity texts focuses primarily on government reports,reports on National Congress of the Communist Party of China,President Xi Jinping’s speeches and so on,with even fewer discussing the translation of government white papers.Being a part of political publicity texts,the white paper can make a real difference for international communities to have a correct understanding of China’s domestic situations and policies.In a formal,official tone,such texts objectively expound the current state of China’s development,and they frequently contain a plethora of imperceptible metaphors.Henceforth,the goal of this study is to compare and analyze metaphors in Chinese and English version of Tibet Since 1951:Liberation,Development and Prosperity published by State Council Information Office,and to summarize the translation strategies of metaphors used by the translators in the English version on the basis of cultural linguistics,which studies the relationship between language and culture,with imagery theory at its core,and explains the relationship between language,human being and social environment.The major findings in this thesis are as follows:(1)The metaphors in the white paper are identified and divided into structural metaphors,ontological metaphors,and orientational metaphors.Among them,structural metaphor enjoys the largest numbers in this text;Ontological metaphors appears less than the former;The frequency of recurrence in orientational metaphors is the highest due to the solidification of Chinese expression habits.(2)The translation strategies of metaphor in this text are found and analyzed by comparing the English translation of the white paper to the original text,and it is summarized that the translators primarily use the following five translation strategies of metaphor: vehicle preservation,vehicle replacement,vehicle deletion,vehicle interpretation,and vehicle addition.It is also discovered that several translation methods such as literal translation,liberal translation(paraphrasing and idiomatic translation)as well as translation skills like addition,omission and shift,could be used by the translators.(3)Three major elements affecting metaphor translation procedures in the white paper are concluded in light of Palmer’s theory of cultural linguistics: text type,metaphor language features,and metaphor cultural background.