On Conceptual Metaphors And Their Translation Strategies In Red Sorghum

The substantial awareness of metaphor has endured dramatic changes in comparison with the traditional perspective of metaphor since the 1970 s. Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a figure of speech, as a linguistic expression which is substituted for another expression and whose main function is the stylistic embellishment of the text. However, in the book Metaphors We Live By co-written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, metaphor serves as a cognitive activity and the essence of it is to understand and experience one sort of thing in terms of another.The turn of metaphor studies from rhetoric to cognition has enlightened metaphor translation as well. Traditional studies on metaphor translation are also based on an understanding of metaphor as a figure of speech. Most of them are limited to the language analysis, such as linguistic meanings and forms.According to cognitive linguistics, verbal sign is a carrier of thinking and thus language is on the premise of cognition. Since cognition varies from culture to culture, translation is considered as a process of transferring cognitive modes obtained in one language to another and meanwhile, it is also a spread of national culture. Now that cognition is also the foundation of metaphor, it is unwise to analyze metaphor translation without mentioning the cognition embodied in two different languages. In contrast, conceptual metaphor theory has concentrated on the cognitive function of metaphor, which has made up for the deficiency of the traditional views of metaphor and provided new insights for the analysis of metaphor translation.This thesis has studied metaphorical expressions in Mo Yan?s Red Sorghum(Honggaoliang Jiazu, 2014) from the perspective of ontological metaphors, orientational metaphors and structural metaphors, the classification of conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson. By analyzing the cognitive mappings of metaphorical expressions, this thesis attempts to probe into how conceptual metaphor theory helps to shape characters and express the theme of the novel. With a comparative analysis of Mo Yan?s Red Sorghum and its translated version by Howard Goldblatt, this thesis aims to find out how Goldblatt reproduces conceptual mappings of the source text within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory. Finally, several ways of metaphor translation adopted by Goldblatt in the translated Red Sorghum, such as literal translation, meaning translation, communicative translation, semantic translation and deletion have been summarized to facilitate the development of metaphor translation strategies, which in the meantime, justifies that it is reasonable and feasible to study metaphor translation from Chinese to English in light of conceptual metaphor theory.