A Corpus-based Study Of Metaphors In The Translated English Texts Of Caigentan

As a book of aphorisms and maxims, Caigentan, stresses self-cultivation and self-admonition with thoughts deep-rooted in Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Critical Metaphor Analysis and a corpus of the translated texts are adopted in the research. By observation and analysis of the metaphors related to’de德’ and ’xin’心’ in the translated English texts of Caigentan, this study tries to answer three questions:1) What metaphors in relation to key concepts of Caigentan could be identified in the translated English versions?2) From a phraseological perspective, what patterns could be identified in the use of the metaphors?3) What meaning relationships are displayed in such patterns with reference to their counterparts in the original text?Based on the classification and statistical analysis, this research has found around200metaphors with ten kinds of metaphors related to de and twelve kinds to xin analyzed. The metaphorical images related to de and xin can be categorized into physicalification and personification which include water, object, container, plant, soil, human, etc.. Both commonness and semantic differences exist:1) xin and de share some common characteristics such as variability, powerfulness and the needs for cultivation;2) de owns material property and invisibility while xin has spatial property and visibility;3) de needs continuous accumulation to reach the ideal state whereas xin requires reduction and purification to achieve perfection. This study also finds that because of the external factors these metaphors cannot find their appropriate counterparts in the translated texts and sometimes new metaphors appear.This research could facilitate the understanding of the cultural differences between China and the West, and the corpus-based critical metaphor analysis could enrich the studies on the metaphor identification, meaning analysis and translation comparison. Besides, this research shows that metaphor is a process of meaning interpretation rather than a meaning reflection from source domain to target domain. Moreover, it could also enrich translation studies of Caigentan from a metaphorical perspective, beneficial to future studies on translations of Chinese classics.