On Sexual Language In Shakespeare’s Plays And Its Chinese Translation From Perspective Of Cognitive Metaphor

Generally speaking,"sexual language" covers a broad range of connotations. In Shakespeare’s plays, sexual language mostly refers to bawdy that is often expressed metaphorically in the form of wordplays, especially by puns (Liang Shiqiu,2002). In view of this, this thesis is to initiate an analysis into the sexual language in Shakespeare’s plays from a micro perspective.In Shakespeare’s plays, wordplays are frequently used for conveying the sexual implications. The sexual language, not only heighten the dramatic effect of humor and sarcasm but also represent characters’images and reveal characters’thoughts, has featured in Shakespeare’s dramatic language. However, according to the author’s investigations, without systematic theoretic foundations, the studies on neither language nor translation level of Shakespeare’s sexual language are comprehensive and profound. Particularly, because of the social and moral constraint, the domestic studies are nearly blank. And in the current Chinese translation versions, there are a lot of problems on the sexual language’s translations, most of which could not represent the exquisiteness and delicateness of the source language.Based on the current research, this thesis tries to use the cognitive metaphor theory to analyze the sexual language in Shakespeare’s plays and its Chinese translations. By tracing back the development of cognitive metaphor theory, the author believes that this theory can be manipulated as an appropriate and powerful application to analyze the construing of metaphors and the mental process of metaphor translation, and it also provides a new perspective for Shakespearean studies.In this thesis, one of Shakespeare’s early comedies Love’s Labour’s Lost is used as the main data, at the same time, some lines from Measure for Measure, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Merry Wives for Windsor are selected. On the basis of cognitive metaphor theory, the classification of sexual language and the summarization of its metaphoric functions are done. Also, by combining a contrastive analysis of Liang Shiqiu, Zhu Shenghao and Fang Ping’s translations, this thesis makes a conclusion of the main translating methods used in the current translation versions and the problems remained. At the end of this thesis, cognitive metaphor theory is again applied to discuss the translating process of Shakespeare’s sexual language, and two key translation strategies----equivalent mapping translation and equivalent deviating translation----as well as some other strategies are proposed.Doing translation studies on Shakespeare’s sexual language from the perspective of cognitive metaphor is brand new, and hopefully it can fill the gap for this research area.