Conceptual Metaphors On Life Theme In Shakespeare’s Sonnets And Translations

Life theme, a highly abstract concept, is usually defined and expressed with theuse of other concept, thus life becomes a main topic of research on metaphors. Thisessay makes an analysis of the conceptual metaphors on life theme in Shakespeare’sSonnets based on Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory, which falls into threecategories, namely ontological metaphors; structural metaphors and orientationalmetaphors. And there are sub-categories under each of the six major conceptualmetaphors.Within the framework of cognitive linguistics and based on Nida’s functionalequivalence theory, the thesis explores three kinds of cognitive processes of translatingfor the above three situations. On this basis, the translation versions of Liang Zongdai,Tu An and Cao Minglun are taken into exploration, which focus on the metaphoricalexpressions of the conceptual metaphor translation. With the analysis and conclusion,the strategies and translation methods are as follows: when the conceptual metaphorexists in both English and Chinese, translators adopt the literal translation to translateto metaphorical expressions projected by same conceptual metaphors in order toachieve maximal equivalence; while similar conceptual metaphors exists in bothlanguage and absent conceptual metaphors in translated language, free translation canbe adopted to try to achieve the functional equivalence and the specific translationmethods are reproduction, conversion, deletion and four-character chinese expressions.