A Study On The Chinese Translation Of Desperate Housewives-A Perspective Of The Conceptual Metaphor Theory(On Translation And Practice)

Since the introduction of cognitive science into linguistics,researches on metaphor have been becoming one of the most significant branches of cognitive linguistics.In 1980,the publication of the book Metaphors We Live By written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson symbolized the theoretical maturity of the contemporary metaphor theory,in which a metaphor is understood as a cross-domain mapping from the concrete source domain to the abstract target domain.In other words,people usually get to know strange,and intangible things through the concept of familiar,concrete and tangible things in their daily life,and thus forming the cognitive way of associating two different concepts.According to this theory,metaphor is ubiquitous in people’s everyday life,not only pervasive in language,but also common in human beings’ thoughts and actions,playing a decisive role in the way how people view the world.This dissertation chose 40 episodes(translated by the Sheng Cheng Group,or "SCG"for short)randomly from all the eight seasons of Desperate Housewives as the research topic.It is an attempt to make a comparative study on conceptual metaphors in Desperate Housewives,as well as the cognitive mechanism,generating mechanism and deductive mechanism behind them via quantitative and qualitative approaches.The study shows that both Chinese and English have their own metaphor systems which have similarities and differences as well.In terms of judging whether the translation quality is good or bad,one of the most workable principles is that translators need to maximize the similarities behind the two conceptual metaphor systems and minimize the differences,so as to achieve cognitive equivalence of the two languages and gain similar responses in both Chinese and English audiences.In light of this,the author tentatively proposed principles for translating at generic level,specific level and linguistic level respectively so as to assess the quality of the metaphor translation in Desperate Housewives.It is hoped that this dissertation can be of some help to promote people’s deeper understanding of Desperate Housewives and the American culture,especially the middle-class American culture.Meanwhile,it’s also hoped that it can be beneficial for English translators and interpreters to have a deeper processing,understanding and storage of conceptual metaphors,so as to polish their language skills in everyday communication and translation tasks and fit in the English cultural environment in a better way.However,given the limitation of many factors,such as the contents selected and time,this topic still needs further exploration to support and its research results need to be verified.