A Study Of Metaphors In The Chinese And English Versions Of Mo Yan’s Three Works From The Perspective Of Windowing Of Attention

Mo Yan’s works chiefly reflect the complex emotion of “homesickness” and “rural resentment”,and also deeply reflect the scenes of rural people’s life in the historical period of Gaomi.There are a lot of structural metaphors,orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors in Mo Yan’s works.These metaphors can not only vividly reveal the current situation of the society in the novel,but also express the rich emotion of the people in Gaomi County,which are closely related to the traditional Chinese culture.According to the cognitive linguistics,metaphor is the result of mapping between the source domain and the target domain.Through the process of mapping,the important information is highlighted in the foregrounded part of attention,and the secondary information is hidden as the background.For this reason,through the distribution of attention in Talmy’s Windowing of Attention,we can not only understand people’s emotion and social phenomena expressed by metaphors more clearly and vividly,but also gain some theoretical insights into the field of translation,so as to promote the spread of Chinese and Western culture.Based on Talmy’s Windowing of Attention,this thesis studies the metaphorical representations of Mo Yan’s three works including The Garlic Ballads,Frog,Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and their English versions.The study follows three steps.First,guided by MIP(Metaphor Identification Procedure)in the perspective of Windowing of Attention,altogether 157 metaphors are manually extracted from Mo Yan’s three works,and then divided into five categories based on the five types of Windowing of Attention.Second,according to the five types of Windowing of Attention,characters’ emotion in the metaphors of the Chinese versions by Mo Yan’s three works and their English versions by Howard Goldblatt is further explored.By exploring the mechanism of window opening and closing and readers’ attention distribution while comparing the English and Chinese versions of the metaphors,the thesis tries to investigate how metaphors effectively convey the inner intention of the characters.Third,this thesis also discusses the creative cultural values embedded in the two versions of metaphors concerning the social context.The findings will shed some light on the translation of Chinese novels,provide valuable guidelines for teaching practices,and ultimately help promote the publicity of Chinese literary works in the English-speaking world.This thesis finds that in Mo Yan’s three works,metaphors under the five types of Windowing of Attention contain rich cultural connotations in conveying characters’ emotion,which account for 80%.Path Windowing mainly conveys the generation of negative emotion,anger-hatred metaphors,in the process of movement through Open Path Windowing and Fictive Path Windowing;Causal-chain Windowing reveals the causes and subsequent effects of negative emotion,anger-hatred metaphors and sadness metaphors,through dynamic scenarios;As for the Phase Windowing,cyclic events center on the duration of the sadness metaphors and happiness metaphors;Participantinteraction Windowing focuses on the primary and sub-ordinate circumstances,chiefly applied in the complaining metaphors and sadness metaphors;Interrelationship Windowing mainly studies the interrelationship between “Figure” and “Ground” to explain the anger-hatred metaphors and adoration metaphors.By retaining the mapping and transformed mapping of the metaphor,Howard Goldblatt integrates the translation ecology and cognitive mechanism thus preserving the Windowing of Attention in the translation,so that the original text and Goldblatt’s translation get a high degree of integration in both language and culture,which not only truly delivers sufficient contextual effects to the target language readers,but also ensures that Chinese cultural contents are not by large filtered by the English culture.He also guarantees the aesthetic value and imagination of the translation with his high translation skill and novel creativity,so that English readers can comprehend the true meaning of the original text and feel the vividness of Chinese from it.