A Study On Color Terms And Their Translation In Shakespeare’s Plays:a Metaphorical Cognitive Perspective

In recent years, most of the studies on color terms are E-C contrastive studies, focusing on the social and cultural differences between English and Chinese color terms. Some of these studies only focus on basic color terms, but few researchers pay attention to the variant color terms; and at home nearly no research is conducted from the perspective of cognitive metaphor on color terms in Shakespeare’s plays. It is significant for us to do a study of color terms in Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of cognitive metaphor.This thesis attempts to arouse attention to the color terms (both basic and variant color terms) in Shakespeare’s plays, and enrich the study of Shakespeare’s language. Firstly, taking color terms in Shakespeare’s plays as research objects, this thesis analyzes the metaphoric cognitive mechanism of color terms and proves that Conceptual Metaphor Theory has certain limitation in explaining metaphors of color terms, and "one-way mapping" and "Invariance Principle" are inadequate in explaining some complex metaphors of color terms. Secondly, this thesis explores the rhetorical usage of the basic color terms and the variant ones (i.e., non-basic color terms) from the metaphorical cognitive perspective and finds that rhetorical device is an important method and an inevitable stage of color terms’ cognition; metaphorical cognition and rhetorical device are indispensable to each other. Thirdly, from the perspective of metaphorical cognition, translation study of color terms (especially color terms of metaphorization) in Shakespeare’s plays shows that current Chinese versions of Shakespeare’s plays mainly adopt two strategies in translating the color terms, namely ideal mapping equivalence translation and zigzag mapping equivalent translation; what’s more, cognitive metaphor can be used as a guiding theory for translation. Lastly, through the analysis of current color terms usage, the author explores the relationship between color terms and the cognition of color, analyzes the vitality and development of color terms. The author hopes that this study will provide support and rethinking for the vital function of color terms in the cognition of human language.