A Study On Conceptual Metaphors And Their Translations In Feng Ru Fei Tun

Metaphor has been widely explored in the domain of translation studies. In most cases, most traditional translations theories are based on understanding metaphors as a figure of speech, and neglect the cognitive nature of metaphor. In 1980, the publication of the book Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson broke the limitations of metaphor studies and provided a new perspective for metaphor translations studies. They proposed the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, claiming that metaphors are not only figures of speech but a way of how human beings perceive the world and structure their experience of interactions with the outside world. According to the nature of conceptual metaphor, translation is a kind of cognitive activity that people understand the experience of one language community in terms of another. Therefore, there is no doubt that the theory of cognitive linguistics of Lakoff and Johnson provides a broad space for translation research.Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Mandelblit’s “Cognitive Translation Hypothesis”, four major metaphors are selected in Feng Ru Fei Tun as research subject in an attempt to discuss the translation of metaphors in literary works.First of all, the study provides a theoretical framework for the whole thesis by giving a detailed introduction of CMT and Mandelblit’s “Cognitive Translation Hypothesis”. Secondly, under the guidance of theoretical framework, the four major metaphors—breast metaphor, animal metaphor, emotion metaphor and culture-specific metaphor are classified and analyzed thoroughly. Metaphors in literary works created by the author with elaborations aren’t only to decorate the language itself but to deeply reflect the author’s thoughts and the main theme of his works. Now that metaphor is the transferring process of people’s experience, metaphors in different cultures may convey different cognitive experience, based on which Mandelblit proposed “Cognitive Translation Hypothesis”: Similar Mapping Condition(SMC) and Different Mapping Condition( DMC). The nature of this hypothesis is that the more two cultures share the similar conceptualized experience, the easier the translation task will be under the SMC. If not, translators will encounter some difficulties under DMC and have to find out the best way to compensate the differences between the two different cultures. Third, based on “Cognitive Translation Hypothesis” and translation techniques Howard Goldblatt adopted in Feng Ru Fei Tun, this study finds out most of the breast metaphor, animal metaphor, emotion metaphor in both Chinese and English language are under the same mapping conditions, which can be literally translated in a direct way; while as for culture-specific metaphors in both languages are under different mapping conditions, in which translators are likely to make use of free translation or omission due to linguistic and cultural differences.