On Translating Metaphor In English News Headline Into Chinese

As the “eye” of news report, news headline plays a crucial role in news.Metaphor, because of its economy and vividness, is always adopted in news headlinesin order to make them more precise, lively and attractive. However, the difficulty oftranslating news headline increases due to the existence of metaphors which possessunique cultural connotation.Metaphor has long been regarded merely as a figure of speech in the history oftranslation studies. As a branch of cognitive psychology, conceptual integration theoryis firstly initiated by Gills Fauconnier, an American cognitive psychologist. Itsfour-space model has been widely applied in many aspects of linguistic studies.Conceptual integration theory provides a new perspective---a cognitive way to dostudy about the cognitive process of metaphor and metaphor translation methods so asto do a better work in metaphor translation, especially metaphor translation in Englishnews headline.This thesis aims to find out the root cause of the failure in equivalent metaphortranslation---the difference of generic spaces in different languages---by analyzingthe changes of the metaphorical concept system in the process of language transitionfrom the cognitive perspective. The similarity of the source domain and the targetdomain in two languages can diminish the influence which the difference of genericspaces brings about to metaphor translation. Equivalency in metaphor translation canbe logically achieved when the generic spaces in different languages become similarenough to arouse similar reactions of both the source language readers and the targetlanguage readers. The author intends to analyze metaphors and their translations inthree main types of English news headlines: sports, war and financial English newsheadlines in which the frequency of metaphor occurrence is relatively high. And thestrategies applied in metaphor translation in English news headlines are alsoconcluded in the last chapter.