A Study On English Translation Of Conceptual Metaphors In The Governance Of China By Xi Jinping(volume 1)

The first volume of The Governance of China contains 79 important speeches made by President Xi from November 2012 to June 2014.It is not only a book for Chinese people to interpret the development of China nowadays,but also an authoritative text for international community to understand today’s China.This study uses 79 articles in Volume I of The Governance of China and its English translation as corpus,classifies the conceptual metaphors according to their themes,and compares the bilingual texts to get the translation methods.Conceptual metaphor is an important concept in cognitive linguistics,which is used to explain people’s cognitive psychology,therefore,this paper introduces a psychological term,psychological distance to analyze conceptual metaphor in bilingual text.Here,we call it conceptual psychological distance.This study classifies the conceptual metaphor in the book by combining the target domain with the theme of every speech.The four main themes in the book are development,peace,unity and crisis,so there are four main kinds of metaphor to help understand the themes,which are development metaphor,peace metaphor,unity metaphor and crisis metaphor.The target domains of different theme metaphors are projected by specific source domains.These theme metaphors constitute the target domain circle,whose richness of source domain is different.The richness of source domain is mainly determined by the nature of the target domain.There are four ways for translators to deal with these conceptual metaphors.The first one way is direct translation,that is retaining the same conceptual metaphor;the other three ways are indirect translation,that is transforming conceptual metaphor into a new type,decomposing conceptual metaphor and deleting conceptual metaphor.These approaches embody people’s cognitive tendency,which is to narrow the conceptual psychological distance in psychological perspective.Conceptual psychological distance is related to the frequency and duration of people’s contact with concepts.Because of the similarity of living conditions,root metaphor exists,which is almost the same in different languages;while the difference of living conditions results in the difference of conceptual psychological distances between different people in a certain source area,and then leads to different expressions of the same concept.