A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Thai Metaphors And Translations Based On The Four Dynasties

The language expression forms of metaphor are complex.Different metaphorical expressions often need different understanding strategies.The classification of metaphor in modern cognitive psycholinguistics is based on the cognitive function of metaphor.Lakoff?Johnson(1980)points out that metaphor is an important mode of cognitive thinking.Comparison of Chinese-Thai concept translation of historical novel the Four Dynasties deserve to be used as a corpus,because the Four Dynasties won the second prize of the 2^nd National Excellent Foreign Literature Book Award in the 1990s.This research mainly includes the following aspects.The first,it examines the metaphors used in the original Thai text and the translated Chinese version,and shows the comparison between the types of metaphors used by Chinese and Thai.It studies the conceptual metaphor system of Chinese and Thai with the help of Lakoff?Johnson conceptual Metaphor theory,and analyzes and classifies them with the principle of metaphor types of K(?)vecses.The second,it studies the concepts used in the comparative analysis of the types of Chinese and Thai metaphors,and makes an in-depth analysis of the similarities and differences between Chinese and Thai conceptual metaphors.The third,with the help of conceptual blending theory of Fauconnier and Turner,it discusses the translation cognition of Chinese-Thai.The fourth,it expounds the comparison of metaphor types between Chinese and Thai and analyzes the translation method.The last,it discusses the cognitive things and the world of Chinese-Thai.The study on the collection of Chinese and Thai language from the target domain shows that the original Thai language in the Four Dynasties can be divided into eight categories,life,emotion,relationship,morality,time,politics,society and state,and desire.The common types of metaphor are:the relationship between people,the frequency of occurrence is the first;Life type,life and death metaphor are the two types of frequency of the second;Life is a journey,born and begin to struggle,to the end,life finally towards death.Emotional metaphors are used in the third place.Chinese-Thai metaphorical concepts are different in the following aspects:the first,the relationship between people is hierarchical in Thai,well,the democratic view is"people are equal",however the Thai society history is the monarchy,so social hierarchy is still not completely disappeared,influenced by this,the cognition of Thai people relationship is still equal,although from the novel we can find examples of relationship between the Chinese people are equal,but in fact,all countries have the concept of rank,mainly depends on which aspect to judge.Chinese can be compared from social and political status,such as:What is the speaker's status and position in the society?In the Thai example,the relationship between people is hierarchy,which can be judged from the perspective of people themselves'love and hate.From the perspective of translation,the Chinese translation is somewhat different from the original Thai text.The second,the comparison of emotional concepts between Chinese and Thai shows that,the love metaphor in Thai is"love is a liquid",which is fresh and cool.Because Thailand is a tropical country with hot weather,love is fresh and cool,which makes people who are in love feel comfortable.Love metaphor in Chinese is a warm fire.Because the weather in China and Thailand is different,the winter in China is very cold,people need to warm up,so they use"warm"instead of"love",and the concept of love will be warm.The third,the pain is the bitter taste of food in Chinese and pain can be"try and eat"in life,according to Chinese the pain is bitter,Thai,generally do not use taste describe people's emotion,taste is the main character can be used as metaphors,in addition,the"pain"often be the source domain in Thai,the concept of life is suffering(pain),the concept of Thai has been influenced by Buddhism which think life is painful,so death is a relief,death can put down all the heavy things on the back,no more pain.According to the blending theory,when the target language and the source language share the same cognitive concept of using metaphor,the translator can directly translate it,which shows that the two languages have the same part of history,custom,culture,religious belief and other aspects or are known to understand another culture.The main metaphors that Chinese-Thai can directly translate are object metaphors:plant metaphors,water metaphors and fire metaphors,because these metaphors are relatively common in life.And the target domain is having the same concept,which generally cannot be avoided in human life,such as life and death,pain,and desires,or social politics,the relationship between the country and people,the conclusion that Chinese-Thai uses the same metaphor comes from people's experience,because China and Thailand are both Asian countries,things people have seen should have a close contact,therefore Chinese-Thai has the same cognitive concept.Although China and Thailand share some common culture,there are also many differences between the two cultures.Some concepts in the two languages and cultures do not map to each other.The study finds that translators choose to use four methods to solve the problems of translation:liberal translation,ellipsis,analogy method,and using other metaphors.Liberal translation,it only maintains the content of the source language,does not stick to its expression form.Ellipsis,when there is a big difference between the original text and the translated text in matters or culture,the translated text will subtract the content of the original text.The analogy method is when the Thai language uses a unique metaphor to translate the closest approach to the Chinese language,words such as"like"often appear.The metaphor of the target language or the use of other metaphors means that two languages always have different cognition and concepts.When the metaphorical concept in the original language is difficult to understand by using another language,in order to maintain the wonderful flavor of the novel,the translator uses other metaphors instead of the metaphor in the original language.In addition,this paper finds out the metaphorical translation mechanism,and the translation of different metaphors into the target language mainly considers three important viewpoints:cognitive concept,cultural and social system,and metaphorical level.Metaphor translation should first judge the level of metaphor,and the higher level of metaphor must be translated.Secondly,cognitive concepts and cultural and social systems should be considered,and the above four translation methods can be obtained from the mechanism of metaphor translation.The first,a high level of metaphor,cognitive concept or cultural and social system similar to uses analogy method.The second is that the cognitive concept with a high level of metaphor while different from the cultural and social system uses the metaphor method of target language.The third is that the cognitive concept with a low level of metaphor while different from uses the liberal translation.The fourth is that the cognitive concept with a low level of metaphor while different from the cultural and social system uses ellipsis.In addition,the metaphorical translation method can not only solve the problem of Thai-Chinese metaphor translation,but also serve as a reference for the translation of other languages.