On E-C Translation Of Metaphor In Popular Science

Metaphor is a familiar linguistic phenomenon for us, which has attracted the attention of scholars in various fields, such as philosophers, rhetoricians, literary critics and linguists. Metaphor study has a fairly long history in the western world. Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as a dispensable ornamentation of language, which is independent of human cognition. Traditional theories mainly include "comparison theory" and "institution theory". In the middle of 20th century, with the climax of metaphor study, the cognitive approach appeared. The representative is "interaction theory" put forward by Richards. In the year of 1980, Lakoff and Johnson established a new way of metaphor research with the publication of Metaphors We Live By. They introduced "Conceptual Metaphor Theory", claiming that metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon, which is ubiquitous in human life and essential for human language and cognition. This theory is also the theoretical basis for the present study, whose research subject is metaphor and its translation in popular science.It has been widely considered by relevant scholars metaphor should not be used in scientific discourse. However, the attempt to eliminate metaphor in scientific discourse has never worked out for the significance of metaphor in the terms of illustration and comprehension. Metaphor exists pervasively in scientific writings, from scientific terms to scientific discourse, especially in popular science—a special type of scientific discourse, which is a combination of science and literature. Popular science explains in a concrete, vivid and easy way the concepts that are abstract, boring and complicated. The main reason that popular science writing can achieve this effect is the abundant use of metaphor. Therefore, it is necessary to research into the translation of metaphor in popular science. The present thesis mainly studies on the E-C translation of metaphor with the materials mostly selected from English Popular Science Readings, Selections from the World of English and English Salon, etc.This paper aims at finding the principles, strategies and methods in the translation of metaphor in popular science from the perspective of relevance theory. It makes a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the classifications, functions and characteristics of metaphor in popular science on the basis of relevance theory and conceptual metaphor theory after the introduction of the feature and function of popular science. The author divides the metaphor in popular science into three categories from syntactical level and lexical level:common metaphor, culture-loaded metaphor and lexical metaphor, of which the first two belong to the metaphor at syntactical level and the third belongs to metaphor at the lexical level. Then through a detailed analysis of a series of successful examples, the author concludes the translation methods of these three kinds of metaphors respectively under the guidance of the principles and strategies based on the relevance theory.The research findings concerning the translation of metaphor in popular science are as follows:(1) two principles:taking into consideration writer's communicative intention and reader'cognitive environment, and finding the optimal relevance; (2) two strategies: direct translation, indirect translation; (3) four translation methods that are most commonly used:reproducing the original metaphor, from the original metaphor to the same metaphor plus sense or annotation, replacing the original metaphor and from metaphor to non-metaphor or non-metaphor plus annotation; (4) three crucial factors that influence the choice of translation strategies and methods in dealing with the three kinds of metaphors discussed above:common metaphor, the degree to which the source and target languages share common linguistic features; culture-loaded metaphor, the familiarity of the receptor language audience with the source language culture and their acceptability of the original metaphor; lexical metaphor, the TL audience' acceptability of the way of naming in the scientific terms; (5) concluding remarks:the translator should always regard the translation as an interlingual interpretive use while taking into consideration the communicative intention of the original writer and interpretive resemblance between the source language and the target language.