Constructing Metaphors In The English Translations Of Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi, one of the internationally well-received Taoist classics written in the pre-Qin period, has high research value both in philosophy and literature. Its English translation, starting in the late19th century and followed by many complete translations and selected translations, has since aroused great interest in increasing subsequent research. Constructing metaphors in the English translations of Zhuangzi is carried out in this thesis.The essence of metaphor lies in understanding and experiencing an unknown thing in terms of a more familiar one. Metaphor is formed in a certain context when one object is used to talk about another one. It occurs on every level of linguistic units including word, phrase, sentence and discourse. Zhuangzi, with its various stories containing Taoist thoughts, is characterized with plentiful metaphors, making the study on metaphor translation the major task in the research of its English translations.This thesis extracts metaphors from Zhuangzi, with reference to Fang Yong’s modern Chinese translation and annotation, at the same time, selects English versions by James Legge, Burton Watson, Victor H. Mair and Wang Rongpei, from which six types of metaphors are selected for detailed analysis, i.e. metaphors concerning bird, water, tree, fish, dream and people. We focus on how metaphors are constructed in the English translations of Zhuangzi, what translation strategies are involved in them, how the translated metaphors achieve internal coherence, and how the translated metaphors construct discourse and achieve discourse coherence.Through a method of induction, we find that Zhuangzi is a text in which most of the metaphors are constructed on discourse level and almost every story acts as a source domain and the Taoist thought it implies is the target domain. Besides, elements within the source domain of the discourse metaphor can be respectively viewed as a source domain of another metaphor on word or sentence level. As for discourse metaphor (not only in Zhuangzi), translating the metaphor of SL literally in TL is the dominant strategy on textual level, due to the overwhelming authority of the source text, Zhuangzi, and the difficulty in replacing the SL metaphor with a newly created one with the equivalent effect; when translating the metaphor of SL literally with footnote in TL, is employed, full information needed for target readers to understand the original metaphor in Zhuangzi is normally provided. However, the fluency of the target text is largely affected and the joy of readers severely damaged; deletion deteriorates the textual coherence; the strategy of translating the metaphor of SL literally with interpretation is the most advisable one; translating the metaphor of SL literally with amplification is employed when the interpretation is not sufficient in metaphor construction.