A Study On Conceptual Metaphor Translation In Movie Subtitle

According to the “Report on Chinese Films’ Dissemination in European Area in 2018”,Chinese films have a positive influence on European audience’s cognition of Chinese culture.It is the request of a new era to promote China’s image by telling stories of China well and spreading Chinese visions through innovation of international publicity and creation of new concepts,new categorization and new presentation that integrates China and the world.Under this background,it is of great significance to boost Chinese films’ global reputation.Language is the primary obstacle of foreign communication,yet mutual intelligibility of languages is also the prime bridge to communication.Therefore,translation is of vital importance for the recognition of movie in foreign countries.Moreover,more and more English learners regard subtitle not only as the assisting tool to understand audiovisual contents,but also as their language learning material.The accuracy of subtitle is attached to studying value.The metaphors in subtitle are often being omitted given the word limit,which hinders the understanding of targeted audience in certain scenario.In the meantime,studies on audiovisual translation centers on Skopos theory,which emphasizes the commercial value of audiovisual texts but sacrifices the essence of language itself.Cognition is the process people receive and comprehend new concepts.For the untranslatability issue between Chinese and English language system,cognition science,through mapping,provides a new perspective to handle this problem.The main idea of this thesis is to solve communication problem through effective language thinking,to put it in a specific way,to provide understandable and authentic movie subtitles for target audience from cognitive perspective and accelerate the target audience’s recognition of Chinese films.The primary target of this thesis is to provide possible solution for the untranslatability through domain mapping.The theoretical framework of this thesis is conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson who thinks that language is largely metaphorical and there is a universal cognitive language thinking pattern to understand new concepts.Through qualitative research,this thesis distinguishes the conceptual metaphorical thinking pattern that Chinese speakers and English speakers share and differ.Then by research deeper into the domain mapping in conceptual metaphor horizontally,vertically and circumambiently,this thesis tries to bring up correspondent translation strategies.Analyzing corpus of lines and their translated versions from four Chinese films and four English films,151 conceptual metaphors and fifty-eight domain mappings are found.It can be found that Chinese and English shares orientational metaphors like “HAPPY IS UP,SAD IS LOW” and ontological metaphors like “IMPORTANT ASSETS ARE HUMAN ORGANS” and “ABSTRACT CONCEPTS ARE ENTITIES WITH BOUNDARIES”.Yet on disposition of people,aesthetics,the concept of “tian” and selected targeted domain of ontological metaphors,Chinese and English still differs.By comparing and analyzing the domain mappings in English and Chinese,making detailed explanation and analogy of domains,the most equivalent concepts will be found guided by the strategies of refining metaphorical configuration,expanding cognitive path and integrating conceptual mapping.At last,the motif,content and lines of movies will be better presented.