A Study On English Translation Of Metonymy In Li Bai’s Poems From The Perspective Of Cultural Presupposition

The term of presupposition was firstly put forward by Gottlob Frege who is a famous philosopher from Germany in1892. It mainly consists of semantic and pragmatic presupposition. Cultural presupposition is a kind of pragmatic presupposition, which refers to habitual thinking or behavior pattern in a specific cultural background. Translation is the media to mutually communicate, exchange ideas and achieve mutual understanding with people who do not share language and cultural background. So for the translator, the understanding of cultural presupposition is one of the difficulties in the translation, a translator not only has to understand the original meaning of the words and syntax, but also needs to have keen sense to the cultural presupposition.Chinese Tang Poetry is the essence of traditional Chinese culture that has rich connotation and is really profound. There is a wide of variety metonymies in Tang Poetry. Especially the works of Li Bai is the most representative in glorious age of Tang Dynasty. Metonymy is regarded not only as a rhetorical tool, but also as a kind of concept phenomenon and cognitive process which reflects the thinking of human being. Therefore translating metonymy between two languages should change flexibly according to the different degree of cognitive way of things in two kinds of cultural presupposition. Cultural presupposition should have certain explanatory power to poetry translation.Based on the theory of cultural presupposition of cognitive linguistics, this thesis discusses whether the metonymy of the original poem can be represented fully in the target text by analyzing the English versions of metonymy in Li Bai’s poems. This paper concludes that, in order to be able to deal with the presupposition problems about metonymy between the source language and the target language, translators should not only clearly understand the cultural background of the original poem, but also master the social cultural background of the target language readers. Meanwhile, translators need to strengthen the perception of cultural presupposition, and then form a correct judgment. For different cultural presupposition, translators should take appropriate translation methods to represent the metonymy content of the source language in the target language to the most degree, which can better interpret the cultural characteristics of the original poem and make readers appreciate abundant connotation of Chinese poetry, so as to better spread traditional Chinese culture.