On The Culture-specificity Of Chinese Metonymies And Their Translatability

It has been shown by translation practice that metonymy has always been one ofthe most difficult points in translation, thus the study on metonymy translation is ofgreat significance in guiding translation practice. In recent years, the development incognitive linguistics has provided brand new perspective for studying the nature ofmetonymy, and also has expanded the thoughts of studying metonymy translation. Sofar within the framework of cognitive linguistics, there is already a certain amount ofpublished literature on studies of metonymy translation. However, most of theresearches are confined to traditional rhetorical study on metonymy translation, andthe observation on the process of metonymy transfer is relatively neglected. Besides,current studies on metonymy translation are mostly concentrated on language levelonly, and not paying enough attention to other constraining factors of metonymytranslation like culture. Moreover, most of the researches merely apply abstractexplanation based on scattered linguistic data, while not many empirical studies basedon large-scale linguistic data have been carried out. As a result, taking a relativelymature theory of metonymy within the framework of cognitive linguistics, thisresearch uses a methodology of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, so as tostudy the translatability of Chinese metonymies, to explore the constraining factorssuch as culture have on metonymy translation, and to discuss reasons for thetranslatability of Chinese metonymies.This research selects the first twenty-six chapters of ancient Chinese novelShuhuzhuan as the source of linguistic data. Following relevant metonymy theories,metonymies are identified from these chapters, compared with their Englishtranslation in order to summarize the translation methods adopted. Then a table islisted and statistics of the ratio each translation method takes is calculated. From thisstatistics the translatability of Chinese metonymy is judged. Together with the analysis of metonymy samples, factors influencing translatability of Chinesemetonymy are discussed. Through statistical analysis and case study, major findingsof this research include:(1) the majority of Chinese metonymies can be translated. Asfor the linguistic data collected in this research, metonymies which can be translatedthrough strategy of foreignization account for12.0%, and metonymies which can betranslated through strategy of domestication account for74.0%, while metonymieswhich are not translated and are simply omitted account for14.0%;(2)culture-specificity casts a relatively huge influence on translatability of metonymy.Metonymies of cultural generality in both Chinese and English languages can bepreserved in translation, while culture-specific metonymies cannot be preserved intranslation;(3) in addition to culture-specificity, textual conditioning and translator’ssubjectivity also have impact on the translatability of Chinese metonymy to someextent.