On The Demetaphorization Of Grammatical Metaphor In E-C Translation Of Academic Text

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: the Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure is a masterpiece of linguistics written by Roy Harris and Talbot J.Taylor,the emeritus professors at Oxford University.It introduces some important thoughts of western traditional linguistics,and shows the readers the “landmarks” in the history of linguistics.The source text is abundant in grammatical metaphor.However,unlike the congruent expressions,the metaphorical expressions are more complicated in syntactic structure,which not only brings great difficulties to the academic communication between Chinese and foreign scholars,but also becomes a “roadblock” in E-C translation.Thus this thesis tends to translate the grammatical metaphor on the basis of GMT.The thesis first gives a brief introduction of grammatical metaphor theory and classifies the grammatical metaphor in the source text in order to understand the difficulties in its translation.Guided by the three principles of grammatical metaphor translation,namely context principle,readability principle,and coherence principle,the translation method of “demetaphorization” is proposed for these three kinds of grammatical metaphor.On the basis of various translation examples selected from the source text,six main translation methods are put forward,including conversion,unpacking of phrases,deletion,inversion,unpacking of clauses and reconstruction in order to improve the accuracy and fluency of its translation.It has been found out that the mismatch between semantic level and lexico-grammatical level causes translation difficulties in English academic text.Only by understanding and reconstructuring the source text correctly can the right translation be achieved.In the process of understanding,the “metaphorical expressions” should be demetaphorized into the “congruent forms” for deploring its deep meaning,and while in reconstruction,the unpacked information is reorganized according to Chinese sentence structures and patterns of theme development.Though,the thesis only discusses the translation of the fifth and eighth chapters of Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Translation from Socrates to Saussure,it can make some contributions to the translation of other academic writings.