| This report is based on the translator’s Chinese-to-English translation practice of a mythic fiction named Dead Ashes which tells the story between the Hindu God of Destroy Shiva and his wife Uma.The text features elegant style,typical linguistic characteristics and both Chinese and Indian cultural elements.The translator found when she was revising her rendering that she abandoned many metaphors without thinking and used free translation directly.The translator notices that these metaphors are often contained in Chinese idioms or cliches.Some of them have lost the original imagery of their meaning due to extensive,repetitive,and popular usage.And their origins are no longer the focus of attention.Thus there is no need to visualize them in translation.But some others,though also overused in the source language,carries cultural characters or they themselves are cultural symbols.The translator wants to see whether they are possible to be reproduced and thus makes a review of metaphor translation.Many translation theories are designed to make translators’ work easier.But sometime that is at a high price.Based on the existing strategies for metaphor translation,especially Newmark’s classification of metaphors,this report gives it a try to reproduce metaphors as much as possible and testifies the feasibility in most cases excerpted from the mythic story.Generally,the author’s original metaphors are easy to be translated literally.Other metaphors not easy to understand for target readers can be translated with a combination of literal translation,free translation,annotation,amplification and so on.The solutions to the studied cases are based on the translator’s personal judgments.The necessity of the reproduction of metaphors in target language needs further researches to affirm.Additionally,reproducing metaphors in the target language,though helps present the characteristics of the source language,may meanwhile mislead the target readers about the style of the writer as an individual.That is a contradiction to solve in futures studies. |
