On Emotion Metaphor Translation Of Jane Eyre

Emotion plays an important role in human life, human beings experience emotions from both physical and psychological aspects, moreover, not only are human beings able to feel emotions, but to express themselves with emotions. Admittedly, certain concrete objects are often used as prototypes to metaphorize abstract emotions. But few translation studies on emotion metaphors are from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Jane Eyre, a masterpiece of the renowned English author Charlotte Bronte obtains an important position in the canon of world literature. In this novel; there are many emotion metaphors, which play a very important role in understanding the characteristic of the characters in the novel and the development of plots. If these emotion metaphors are not translated appropriately, the translated version cannot deliver the meanings to target readers just as the source text do to its readers, what’s worse, the classic of novel may go astray by improper translation.Based on this, this thesis aims to go on a translation study of emotion metaphor expressions(mainly about happiness, anger, sadness, and fear metaphor expressions) in Jane Eyre from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Three representative Chinese versions of Jane Eyre translated by Huang Yuanshen, Wu Junxie, and Song Zhaolin are chosen as data in this research. And this research tries to answer the following research questions: Firstly, what prototypes are used to express emotions in source text? Secondly, how do these three translators deal with these emotion metaphor expressions and why?From analysis, the major findings are as follows: firstly, in the novel of Jane Eyre, parts of human body, temperature, color, orientation, and familiar objects known by people are used as prototypes that mapped onto the category of emotion. During the process of exploring the unknown world, human beings tend to make use of concrete or familiar objects to metaphorize abstract concepts, and it makes possible that emotions can be described lively and vividly by different prototypes.Secondly, on the whole, it can be found out that emotion metaphor expressions related to human physical or body experiences present more similarities than those related to different cultures in English and Chinese. In many cases, the prototypes of such emotion metaphors are preserved into translated versions. However, owing to the subjectivities and the influence of culture, translators sometimes change the prototypes of emotion metaphors into translated versions even though there are similar prototypes in target language, or even remove the prototypes to express emotions directly. Although translation strategies are different, the purpose would be the same; and the choice of translation strategy should be the proper way of delivering the emotions completely and truthfully into target texts.