A Rhetorical Study On "Eye" And Its Translation In Shakespeare's And Cao Yu's Plays:a Conceptual Metaphor Perspective

Shakespeare has left for 400 years,but his works still spark in the treasure house of literature,and as a language master,his rhetoric usage is extremely abundant;Cao Yu,as the leader of Chinese drama creation,is known as the Shakespeare of China,so these two dramatists are worthy to make a comparative research.This thesis makes a comparative study of the representative works of these two dramatists,the "Four Great Tragedies" of Shakespeare and Thunderstorm and Sunrise of Cao Yu.Visual perception has been put a great importance since ancient Greece,even a scholar has pointed out that of the entire message source about 80%-95%comes from the eyes.However,with the development of cognitive linguistics,the eye is no longer just an organ of the human body anymore;it is the way to know unknown things.Lakoff&Johnson believe that metaphor is a way of thinking,a means of knowing things,and that our life is full of metaphor,and this is conceptual metaphor.Studying from the perspective of conceptual metaphor,based on the corpus of the four great tragedies of Shakespeare and Thunderstorm and Sunrise of Cao Yu,this thesis makes a comparative study of the rhetoric of eye and its translation from the translation versions of Bian Zhilin,Zhu Shenghao and Liang Shiqiu.Through comparative research,the corpus and rhetoric usages of eye in Cao Yu are much more rich than in Shakespeare,and rhetoric and metaphor cognition are inseparable,metaphor cognition is the basis of rhetoric and rhetoric is the language manifestation of metaphor cognition.At last,for translation,after observing the eye translation in different metaphor mappings,the eye translation strategies are divided into two categories:literal translation and free translation.