A Cultural Approach To Metaphor Translation

Just as Mary Snell-Hornby points out: 'metaphor has been long neglected in translation theories'. Traditionally, metaphor was noted only as a primary persuasive element in political rhetoric and viewed as primarily decorative and ornamental in nature. But present researches on it have put forward that metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life, not just in language but also in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical. Since metaphor functions so importantly and it had been neglected for such a long time, its study should be carried out again seriously. Having realized the importance of metaphor and the pressure to study it over again, we must devise a suitable tool for our analysis, I think a study from the perspective of culture is an original method. With the development of translation studies, translation is no longer viewed as a kind of comparative linguistic undertaking but a bridge of cultural communication between different nations. Culture comes to be the focus of translation studies and is proved to play a crucial role in it. Chapter one introduces the academic studying background by presenting a new orientation in translation studies and briefly outlines the organization of the paper. Chapter two begins by talking about the relationships among culture and language and metaphors and then explains why culture is so important in translation studies. Chapter three construes concretely the cultural factors in metaphor and tests why there exist mistranslation and misunderstanding in interlingual metaphor translation. Chapter four manages to solve the problem and put forward that different metaphors or same metaphor in different contexts requires different translation strategies. In Chapter four author also deals with several other factors affecting metaphor translation. Chapter five is a brief conclusion.