A Report On Translating Metaphors From The Perspective Of Cognitive Equivalence

With an increase in exchanges between nations,travel writing has become a popular subject of translation.in the 1920 s,H.V.Morton,a writer in the UK,published his travel writing In Search of England,which records stories of ordinary English people and local traditions that survived.This report is based on the English-Chinese translation of In Search of England.considering the length(about 120,000 English words),a small group was set up to fulfil this task.The author of this report chose the introduction and chapter 11 of this book to translate.Before translation,preparation was done to grasp the features of the source text.It was found out that the source text is rich in metaphorical expressions.By reflecting on the translation process and typical cases,the report discusses how to translate metaphors from the perspective of cognitive equivalence.The author reveals the translation strategies for metaphors by detecting how to achieve cognitive equivalence in metaphor translation from English to Chinese.From the cognitive view,“metaphor is not just a matter of language,but a way of thinking.”(Lakoff &Johnson 1980: 3)metaphor is further divided into two levels: the linguistic level and the conceptual level.Metaphor in the linguistic level is called metaphorical expressions and in the conceptual level theconceptual metaphor.Conceptual metaphor generates metaphorical expressions.The conceptual metaphor is constructed by the source concept domain,the target concept domain and mapping.Comparing mapping conditions between English and Chinese,metaphors in this report are classified into two groups: metaphors of similar mapping conditions and of different mapping conditions.Similar mapping conditions mean shared cognition between two nations.In translation,the source,target domain of English metaphor can be directly projected into Chinese,leading to no misunderstanding among the Chinese readers.Different mapping conditions mean different cognition between the two nations.In translation,equivalent source and target domain should be found out in Chinese,which achieve the same effect with the English metaphor.In order to achieve cognitive equivalence in translation,the following strategies are adopted in translation of metaphors of similar mapping conditions: replacing the metaphor in English with another metaphor in Chinese;Preserving original metaphors.The following strategies are adopted in translation of metaphors of different mapping conditions: same metaphor combined with sense;deletion of English metaphors;replacing the metaphors in English with another metaphor in Chinese.As the report reveals,the translation of metaphors should be cognitive oriented and a translator should have a deep understanding ofthe cognitive basis of the metaphor,so as to achieve the cognitive equivalence in metaphor translation by adopting proper translation strategies.It is expected that this report,from the perspective of the cognitive equivalence,provides some practical solutions for metaphor translation.