On Animal Metaphors And Their Translations In Shakespeare’s Plays From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Animals are widely used in literary works. Shakespeare uses a large number of animal words in his plays to describe his characters or to illustrate philosophy in human life. In the four tragedies, animal words, connected with metaphorical expressions, play an important role in many aspects. Based on the previous studies, the thesis analyses all the animal metaphorical expressions in the four tragedies and then concludes their language features. From the paper, we can see that in the four tragedies, animal metaphors are realized by such rhetorical devices as apparent metaphor, metaphor and functional metaphor, and these rhetorical devices present a variety of features in linguistic forms. The paper also makes a thorough analysis of all the instances of animal metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics so as to generalize the conceptual metaphors behind animal metaphors in Shakespeare’s four tragedies, namely PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS, THINGS ARE ANIMALS, HUMAN’S BRAINS ARE CONTAINERS and IDEAS ARE ANIMALS. At last, the paper compares all the translating techniques used in the existing Chinese version of Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of conceptual metaphor translation theory, and draws a conclusion on the translators’ techniques, which are concluded in the thesis as strategies for ideal mapping and strategies for deviant mapping. The author hopes to make a summary on how to interpret Shakespeare’s dramas properly and finally enrich the strategies for animal metaphors’ translation.