A Report On The Translation Of Metaphors In International Relations Theory (Chapters 8&9)

As one of the most powerful tools for human understanding of the world,metaphor plays an important role in the construction of scientific theory.The field of international relations also relies on metaphor to interpret and understand the abstraction of the discipline.Metaphor has become a part of the narratives of international relations and is constantly changing with the passage of time.Michael Marks is a well-known professor in the field of International Relations and Comparative Politics.His book Metaphors in International Relations Theory is a pioneer work in the field in recent years.The book,which has a review and reflection on the construction of metaphor to international relations theory,is of great theoretical research value.The source text language expression is standardized and rich in logic,which can improve the ability to think and organize language of postgraduate students of translation major.There are a lot of metaphor terms about IR in the text which need to be studied repeatedly before translation.All these could give a large enhancement to the translator's professional literacy and translation ability,thus,it really has a great research significance for doing translation practice.This translation report was made on the translating process of Chapters 8 and 9,and the title of chapter 8 is “Metaphors and changing conceptions of International Relations” and the chapter 9 is “Conclusion” which is a summary of the book actually.The whole translation practice is based on the characteristics of the text with the Political Equivalence as the theoretical guidance.This report made the analysis and summary by selecting some typical cases encountered in the process of translation and organizes the discussion mainly at three levels: at the vocabulary level,it mainly discusses the translation of some metaphorical terms in international relations theory in the text,emphasizing three perspectives based on the features of professionalism,conciseness and contextual correlates of political terminology,in addition,alsoexplores the translation of abstract nouns that are widely available in academic texts;at the syntactic level,starting from the argumentation model of the text “quotation +commentary”,it discusses the translation of quotes and translation of reviews,and also the translation of a large number of passive sentences and compound sentences in this text;at the discourse level,it analyzes the translation of some rhetorical sentences which need to be deliberated from the whole text as well as the cohesion and coherence in the text,hoping all these could make a small reference to the study of translation in the IR theory.