"A Dream Of Red Mansions" Poetry. Conceptual Metaphor Theory Perspective English Translation

In 1980 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put forward the Conceptual Metaphor Theory for the first time in their book Metaphors We Live By. Its publication symbolizes the shift of metaphor from rhetoric to cognitive research. This shift has not only promoted the development of metaphor research, but also developed the translation studies of metaphor. Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this thesis attempts to analyze and contrast the poems of Hong Lou Meng and its two English versions from the following three aspects: love metaphor, color metaphor and orientational metaphor. Through the research, we find that some conceptual metaphors exist in both Chinese and English and some others exist only in Chinese due to the different social and cultural environment. It proves the universality and dissimilarity of Chinese and English metaphor.