Moral metaphor in Shakespeare’s plays and its Chinese translations: a conceptual metaphor perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper makes contrastive analyses of the moral metaphors in Shakespeare's plays and their translations in four Chinese versions. The definition and identification procedures of the moral metaphor are discussed firstly. This paper then puts forward approaches for the contrastive analyses from linguistic and conceptual levels. Results show that the Chinese translators tended to reduce the difficulty in understanding the moral metaphorical expressions, the four Chinese versions differ in terms of semantic category changes, and Zhu's translation is most similar to the source text (ST) in terms of the category structures of moral conceptual metaphors. Translation methods for the moral metaphors in Shakespeare's plays are suggested, including retaining the ST semantic structure, implying the expressed ST semantic components, revealing the implied ST semantic components, retaining the ST semantic categories, adjusting the ST semantic categories and adding notes.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral metaphor
• conceptual metaphor
• Chinese translation
• Shakespeare’s plays

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Note of the English version of Shakespeare’s plays: all the cases of Shakespeare’s plays quoted in the thesis come from THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE, the reprint edition by China Renmin University Press published in 2008, which is authorized by Cengage Learning.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 12BYY130] and 2016 Project of Innovation in Postgraduate Education of Guangxi in Guangxi Normal University [grant number YCSW2016011].

Notes on contributors

Shijian Xie

Shijian Xie, Professor and Dean of the College of Foreign Studies, Guangxi Normal University. He obtained his PhD in Linguistics from Beijing Foreign Studies University. His main areas of research include cognitive linguistics, and language and translation in Shakespeare’s plays. Email: [email protected].

Liman Rao

Liman Rao is an MA graduate of Translation Studies at the College of Foreign Studies in Guangxi Normal University. Her research interests are cognitive linguistics, and language and translation in Shakespeare’s plays. Email: [email protected].