On Puns In Romeo And Juliet And Their Chinese Translation From The Perspective Of Cognitive Metaphor

The plays of Shakespeare embody great application of pun; there are at least175puns identified in Romeo and Juliet. Such puns play an important role in indicating the theme of the play, depicting personalities of the characters, promoting the development of the plot and predicting the fate of the characters and future development of the play. However, according to the author’s investigations, the studies on puns are not comprehensive or profound on both language and translation levels, referring to studies at home and abroad. Moreover, concerning the current Chinese translated versions, there are various problems on their translations. Most of the translations of puns could not represent the original exquisiteness of the play.This thesis tries to use the Theory of Cognitive Metaphor to analyze the puns in Romeo and Juliet and their Chinese translation. With introducing the theory, it is believed that this theory can be a powerful tool to analyze the cognitive features of puns and their cognitive translating process. First, the thesis gives an analysis of cognitive features of the puns, aiming to find out the cognitive understanding process of puns. Findings are as follows:first, the understanding of phonetic puns is based on the cross-domain mappings between the punning words with their similar sounds; second, the understanding of semantic puns is the result of mental-space blending in terms of polysemy under the framework of Blending Theory. Then, with comparing the translated versions by Liang Shiqiu, Zhu Shenghao, Cao Yu and Fang Ping, the author points out the defects of the current translated versions, including omission and mistranslation. After introducing the cognitive process of translating puns, this thesis puts forward three translating strategies:translating with equivalent mapping, translating with equivalent connotations and reproducing punning meanings with compensatory methods.With the translation studies on puns from the perspective of cognitive metaphor, this thesis is meaningful in both theory forming and translation practice for researching into the language of Shakespeare’s plays, and hopefully it can fill the gap for this research area.