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Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis of “Root” Metaphor Translation in Dream of the Red Mansion
LIU Xiao
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2019.02.002
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China
Both the study of metaphor and translation has taken an empirical turn in the past decade, corpus-based method has provided a practical and objective way for investigating metaphor translation from a comparative and cognitive perspective. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the cognitive differences in the perception of “root” between English and Chinese through a contrastive analysis of the two English translations of a Chinese classic novel—Dream of the Red Mansion, the two translations are completed by a native Chinese speaker and a native English speaker respectively. The study is divided into two parts, the first part is devoted to a contrastive analysis of typical examples selected from the data acquired from the online English-Chinese parallel corpus with the online corpus analysis tool Wmatrix, two deductions have been drawn through the analysis concerning the cognition difference in root perception: (1) the integral perception of root and a plant in Chinese VS the binary cognition in English; (2) the concreteness of “root” metaphor in Chinese VS the abstractness in “root” metaphor application in English. Then the two deductions are further demonstrated through corpus-assisted study of “root” metaphor in large online corpuses. The differences in root metaphor usage as well as the cognitive reasons behind the differences have been investigated with emphasis not only on the dominant conceptual root metaphors, but also the semantic preference of the collocated words of the metaphors.
“root” metaphor, Dream of the Red Mansion, corpus-based comparative analysis, cognitive structure
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