《围城》中概念隐喻的文化研究及其翻译策略

上海交通大学硕士学位论文《围城》中概念隐喻的文化研究及其翻译策略姓名：王锦云申请学位级别：硕士专业：英语语言文学指导教师：童剑平20051201摘要本论文以莱柯夫的概念隐喻为理论框架，以小说《围城》中的隐喻表达为研究对象，透视中国传统文化观念，并对隐喻表达的翻译问题进行讨论。

作者结合了计算机统计软件ConcApp和人工分析统计，对钱钟书小说《围城》中隐喻表达进行量化处理，建立了多个小型语料库，尤其是关于《围城》中隐喻表达的平行语料库。

据此，作者对比从而揭示其主题隐喻和高频隐喻表达的隐喻概念，并对其所蕴涵的中国文化模式进行分析，而其英译本中对这些表达的处理更为隐喻翻译策略的探讨提供了大量的例证。

莱柯夫和约翰森合著了《我们依以生活的隐喻》，继承并发展了相互作用理论，对隐喻的本质这样界定：通过另一件事情来理解、经验某事，例如通过行程来理解爱情，通过容器来理解里外，质言之，即概念之间从源域向目标域的跨域映射。

隐喻是难以改述的，它只是一句话的隐含意义的表达式，此外并没有与之相应的字面表达式了。

在这一理论基础之上，本论文作者观察到，哪些成分为隐喻所利用依赖于约定，由此再进一步不难看出，采用何种隐喻因文化而不同。

正如布莱克对大卫王之星的不同透视角度的论述，每一种隐喻都突出了所喻的某些方面而遮蔽了另一些方面，所喻和喻体不对称，正是这种喻体选择的差异为隐喻研究拓展出一个文化研究的空间。

将《围城》中的隐喻表达的典型形式之一与其它两部小说作比较后可见，此部小说可谓“广取譬”的典范；本论文作者就“围城”意象蕴含的所喻——“人对己域的不满足、对他域的企羡”，询问了美国、澳大利亚、日本文化为背景的对象以及作者本人作为中国文化为背景的对象，得出不同的隐喻表达，尤其是在这些不同的喻体意象中隐含了典型的文化特色。

“隔锅饭香”作为中国人对这种所喻的语言表达承载了一定的文化信息，即“民以食为天”的传统观念。

“吃饭”在中国文化中的受关注程度较为典型，作者借助自建的语料库进一步调查了《围城》中的隐喻表达，发现其中涉及“吃”、“穿”、“动物”、“鬼神”意象的隐喻表达较为突出，而与“吃”相关的意象最为显著，以此为棱镜折射出来的中国文化可以浓缩成一个隐喻——“生活就是一餐饭”，而这一隐喻背后蕴含着中国文化中“集体意识”“和谐至上”的心理模式。

在对《围城》中隐喻表达的中、英文比读研究中，作者发现隐喻翻译过程中意象的不对称极为明显，时而丢失、时而变换、时而添加，形成一种有趣现象。

这种翻译活动无异于跨文化交际沟通过程中的理解、误解、冲突、障碍等，因为中英文属于两种语言体系，有着不同的传统、信仰、文字系统，所以在中英文隐喻翻译中存在大量障碍。

此部小说的译者针对不同的隐喻表达采用了对等译、字面译、意象转换、意象重现，以及添加注解和上下文暗示等补偿策略。

关键词：隐喻，概念隐喻，隐喻表达，文化，翻译AbstractThis thesis focuses on the topic of metaphor and culture, as well as translation of metaphorical expressions. Through the combined application of both computer software (ConcApp) and manual statistics, several corpora have been developed respecting metaphorical expressions used in Qian Zhong-shu’s novel Fortress Besieged. Through a qualitative analysis based on a quantitative investigation of the metaphorical expressions and their English translations, this thesis presents a cultural study of the connotations implied in these metaphorical expressions and the strategies in dealing with the translation.The cultural study of these metaphorical expressions is conducted from a cognitive perspective. That approach is inspired by Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory that metaphor is a cross-domain mapping from the source domain to the target domain in the conceptual system, and, therefore, that metaphors permeate almost all aspects of our lives and are, indeed, what we live by. However, people from different cultures have different preferences when referring to certain metaphors, thus there are cultural dimensions of metaphor.However, metaphors are not limited to individual words, or even phrases. A whole poem or novel can be metaphorical, as well. That makes “fortress besieged” much more interesting and insightful when it is given an interpretation other than the literal one. In such a case, the “fortress besieged” is not specified, and it may be viewed as the conceptual metaphor “LIFE IS A FORTRESS BESIEGED.”A similar case is presented by the metaphoric image used in Fortress Besieged that “food” or “eating” is the Chinese people’s favorite. This metaphor implies that LIFE IS A MEAL. It supports the Chinese people’s belief in collectivism and the values of harmony.The metaphorical expressions used in Fortress Besieged are compared with their English translations. The investigation of those metaphorical expressions and their translations shows that people in different cultures share common experiences in mostcases, which makes the translation of some culture-specific metaphorical expressions become possible. However obstacles such as differences in tradition and custom, language system, literature, religion and belief, make the translation of metaphorical expressions rather complicated. Thus translational strategies vary from case to case. Total matching, literal translation, shift of image, and some compensational methods such as foot notes or end notes, contextual hints, as well as repetition of certain metaphorical images are widely used by the translators in dealing with the metaphorical expressions in this novel.Key words: metaphor, conceptual metaphor, metaphorical expressions, culture, translation上海交通大学学位论文原创性声明本人郑重声明：所呈交的学位论文，是本人在导师的指导下，独立进行研究工作所取得的成果。

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学位论文作者签名：王锦云日期： 2006年 3 月 14 日上海交通大学学位论文版权使用授权书本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定，同意学校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版，允许论文被查阅和借阅。

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（请在以上方框内打“√”）学位论文作者签名：王锦云指导教师签名：童剑平日期： 2006 年 3月 14日日期： 2006 年 3 月 14日AcknowledgementsIt has been an arduous voyage. Upon its completion, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all the teachers for their excellent lectures that have prepared me well for this journey.No acknowledgements can adequately describe my debt to my supervisor Prof. Tong Jian-ping who guided me in the study of Cross-cultural Communication. From the planning of the thesis to its completion, I have benefited enormously from her timely guidance, illuminating criticism and insightful remarks. Without her supervising, the present thesis would not have been finished.A great deal I owe to Shanghai Jiao T ong University for granting me excellent academic training and the special opportunity to proceed with my study and to complete my pursuit of the master degree.I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Milt Morris and Prof. Wei Nai-xing. I have benefited a great deal from their inspiring teaching and instruction which laid a foundation for the completion of my study.I am especially grateful to my dear parents and husba nd for encouraging me with their loving care and words during my postgraduate study.Last but not least, I would like to thank my friends and classmates with whom I have discussed the ideas that occurred to me during the writing of this thesis.Chapter 1 IntroductionIt is common to think of metaphor as merely stylistic decoration. When we complain that marriage is a besieged fortress, we are usually using a highly metaphorical style. However, as we work closely with metaphor, we should remember that it is not simply a cosmetic device, but a powerful tool that enables discourse and pervades all rhetorical strategies and structures.1.1 Definition of MetaphorMetaphor can be simply regarded as speaking of one thing in terms of another which it resembles. Both this “one thing” that is metaphorically described and that describing “another” thing have many names. For example, “tenor” and “vehicle” (Richards, 1936), “focus” and “frame” (Black, 1962), “primary subject” and “secondary subject” (Black, 1979), “object” and “image” (Newmark, 1982), and “target domain” and “source domain” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) are used in connection with metaphors. The two components of metaphor come together to reach a point of similarity or resemblance (simile and metaphor), a point of representation (metonymy and synecdoche), a point of deduction (models), or a point of allusion, which illustrates the deep structure of human thinking—linking one thing with another. This thesis applies Lakoff’s “target domain”, “source domain” and “mapping”, with “target domain” referring to the conception which is described metaphorically, “source domain” referring to the experience the “target domain” is trying to cover, and “mapping” referring to the particular aspects of the “target domain” and the “source domain” which are overlapping.To further illustrate the mechanism of metaphor, this thesisintroduces another concept: “montage.” Montage can be viewed as a cinematic device used to show a series of scenes, all related and building to some conclusion1. A montage involves: (1) the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated shots or scenes which, when combined, achieve meaning (as in, shot A and shot B together give rise to an third idea, which is then supported by shot C, and so on); or (2) a series of related shots which lead the viewer to a desired conclusion (as in, shot A leads to shot B leads to shot C... leads to shot X; shot X being the outcome of the sequence)2. It is pointed out that metaphor is not just a rhetoric device, but rather a way of thinking. It functions in much the same way as “montage” functions in our mental world—linking different images together by both agreement and conflict to construct new images dynamically.1.2Basic Aims of the Present StudyMetaphor is a window through which customs, histories, and values of different cultures can be seen, especially when we compare different Chinese and English metaphorical expressions. And, this brings us to the basic aim of the present thesis, which is to discuss metaphors from a cognitive perspective. Metaphors such as “LIFE IS A JOURNEY”, “LIFE IS A FORTRESS BESIEGED”, or “LIFE IS A MEAL” imply different aspects of “life” conception which can be shared by people in different cultures. However, people from different cultures have their own preferences because of the influence of their cultural backgrounds. For example, LIFE IS A MEAL is a typical metaphor used by Chinese people to express their perception of “life.” The discovery of these conceptual metaphors is based on a personal 1Cited online: 2Cited online: /tech/film_terms.htmlinvestigation on people of different cultural backgrounds and on the parallel metaphor corpus3, which is built through the reading of both the Chinese original and the translated English version of Fortress Besieged.The study of metaphor has undergone revolutionary changes several decades before. The stimulus for the explication of these revolutionary changes comes from two sources: the traditional views of metaphor as a poetic device excluded from everyday language on the one hand, and the “cognitive turning” of metaphor studies made by the twentieth-century conceptualists on the other. The cognitive perspective of metaphor study, together with a cultural dimension of metaphor connotation, provides a theoretical standing point for the whole thesis. Cognitive metaphor functions as the essential foundation for the following analysis of metaphoric conceptions in Fortress Besieged. Besides, metaphorical diversity between cultures is also very important, especially when the cultural dimension of metaphor studies is considered. All of this will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.Metaphorical conception and its cultural diversity have rarely been considered in relation to each other in the translation of metaphors. Despite the fact that the translation’s choice of words, or its syntax, frequently raises cultural issues, and that metaphor translation therefore constitutes a congenial area of cultural investigation, attempts at applying statistics and corpus analysis to metaphor study and its translation, in relation to English and Chinese at any rate, have been scarcely made so far. Thus, in contrast with the conceptual analysis 3This corpus is composed of 1133 metaphorical expressions (both the Chinese original and the English translation) ranging from words and idioms to sentences and paragraphs, which are respectively selected from the original Chinese version and the English translation of the novel Fortress Besieged.widely undertaken in Anglo-American intralingua metaphor studies for the past thirty years or so, criticism of metaphor translation, particularly of the metaphor translation from Chinese to English, has remained remarkablely traditional, characterized by general and impressionistic comments on culture or by an intuitive analysis with a notable lack of sensitivity to the subtle conceptual system underlying source and target cultures.To bring studies of metaphor translation up to date and to improve the quality and standard of metaphor translation, there is an urgent need to replace traditional impressionistic approaches by more precise and more culture-inviting models and methods.Another aim of the present thesis is therefore to argue, mainly by way of practical analysis of culture-loaded images, that metaphor translation functions the same as cultural communication. It can be better conducted by a comparison of conceptual and cultural system between the source language4 and target language5, and thus bridges the gap between the cultures by much more mutual understanding.The Chinese novel Fortress Besieged, or Wei-cheng, together with its English version, is chosen here for the further discussion on the metaphor and its translation rather than an English novel. For one thing, Fortress Besieged is considered to be one of the most influential, if not the best, novels in modern Chinese literature. For another, the contrastive study of metaphors with Chinese-to-English language translation is significantly less than the contrastive study of metaphors with English-to-Chinese translation. The present study makes known to people in non-Chinese speaking cultures, especially those who speak English, some knowledge of the Chinese people’s central cultural4Meaning Chinese as far as the present thesis is concerned.5Meaning English as far as the present thesis is concerned.patterns through the comparative study of metaphors and the translation in Fortress Besieged.1.3 About Fortress Besieged (FB)Fortress Besieged (hereinafter referred to as “FB”), is arguably the best of Qian Zhong-shu’s pre-1949 works. Throughout this novel, especially in Section 1, references are made to Chinese and Western literature, philosophy, logic, customs, laws, educational systems, and other areas, such as foreign languages and feminism. Structured in nine chapters, FB “is a comedy of manners with much picaresque humor, as well as a scholar’s novel, a satire, an observation of courtship and marriage, and a study of one contemporary man”, remarks of Nathan K. Mao (2003, ix), one of the translators of this novel.First serialized in Literary Renaissance (Wen-i-fu-xing) and published in book form in 1947, FB has been acclaimed as “one of modern China’s two best novels,” or even her “greatest novel.” Among different views on the merits of the novel, C.T. Hsia has highly praised the novel’s comic exuberance and satire; Dennis Hu, its linguistic manipulation; Theodore Huters, its relationship to modern Chinese letters. In addition, Mai Ping-kun has written favorably about Qian’s essays and his fiction (Mao, 2003). Each critic has stressed is one aspect of the novel’s multifaceted brilliance.Translation of the English version of Fortress Besieged was performed cooperatively by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, the former doing the first draft and the latter revising it, and writing the introduction as well as refining the footnotes. Jeanne Kelly has translated many Chinese short stories and scholarly articles, and Nathan K. Mao, a professor of Shippensburg State College, is the translator of Twelve Towers and Cold Nights, and the author of Li Yuand Pa Chin.The translators, whose mother tongue is English, are certainly more familiar with the Western culture than the Chinese culture as far as the novel is concerned. Therefore, they found it rather easy to deal with the part involving the former in the process of translation. However, the differences between the English language and Chinese, English history and culture and Chinese, the English conceptual system and Chinese, constitute a great problem in the translation, especially the translation of metaphorical expressions.This thesis does not comment on the accurateness of the translation of FB, but discusses the metaphor translation involved, as well as the difficulties involved in the Chinese—English translation, and the conceptual differences between the Chinese culture and the English culture. Also, the ways the translators tackle the difficulties of translation are discussed in detail.1.4 MethodologyThe present thesis, which focuses on the topic of metaphor and culture as well as translation of metaphorical expressions, is mainly a qualitative study based on a quantitative investigation.Through a combined application of both computer software (ConcApp) and manual statistics, the author managed to build up several corpora respecting metaphorical expressions used in Qian Zhong-shu’s novel Fortress Besieged, especially a parallel corpus covering almost all metaphorical expressions ranging from words and phrases to sentences and paragraphs. So the present research of metaphorical expressions is also a corpus-based study.ConcApp is a user-friendly text analysis program. It offers concordances, collocations and word frequency statistics. It can also beused to edit text files. Support is offered for English, Japanese and Chinese characters. With the help of the statistic software ConcApp, the occurrences of words and phrases of simile, which are important components of metaphors, such as “xiang(像), ” “si-de(似的), ”“fang-fu (仿佛), ” “wan-ru (宛如、有如), ” “hao-bi (好比), ” “pi-ru (譬如), ” and “Gen…yi-yang (跟…一样)6” in Fortress Besieged, are compared with such occurrences in two other novels, Mao Dun’s Midnight and Lu Xun’s Ah Q.The building of the parallel corpus is all by manual statistics, which requires careful reading and selecting. In this corpus of total 70,189 words of both Chinese and English, there are altogether 1133 units of metaphorical expressions, among which similes, metaphors, allusions, idioms, proverbs and so on are comprehensively accepted as forms of metaphorical expressions. To keep the expressions clear in meaning, their necessary contexts are attached, which may unavoidably lead to the phenomena that some statistical units may include more than one metaphorical expression. Through further statistical selection, the author builds several sub-corpora of metaphorical expressions, containing images of “eating”, “clothing”, “animals”, “god/ghost”, etc. The comparative study of these sub-corpora becomes necessary in dealing with the metaphorical concepts implied in.The examples used in the discussion of metaphor translation are also selected from this parallel corpus. For the reason that the building of this corpus is totally based on the electronic edition of the novel Fortress Besieged without any page number corresponding to its book form, all the examples in this thesis are not given their page numbers.6 These Chinese phrases are equal to “are like”, “the same as”, “resemble” etc. in English.1.5 Organization of the ThesisThe thesis is composed of five chapters. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, a literature review of metaphor theories, as well as the cultural dimension of metaphor, is presented in Chapter 2.Then, Chapter 3 presents a discussion on the thematic metaphor implied in the novel, and a discussion on specific metaphorical details chosen by people in different cultures to convey the conceptual metaphor.And Chapter 4 deals with the translation of metaphorical expressions. The first section of this part presents the obstacles in translation of metaphorical expressions, and the second section, some useful strategies that can be used in translation. The discussion is supported mainly by examples from Fortress Besieged.Finally, Chapter 5 presents the conclusion of the whole thesis, the limitation of the present research and the implications for future study.Chapter 2 Literature ReviewInstead of being a mere rhetoric device applied only by a few insightful writers, metaphor is, indeed, a daily used means people use to make themselves understood. I.A. Richards, an English rhetorician, claims that there would appear to be a metaphor in every three sentences in our daily speech. (Richards, 1936: 98) According to the estimation of Pollio et al (Pollio, Barlow, Fine and Pollio, 1977), a person would use four metaphorical figures of speech every minute in free talks. (Shu, 2000: 1)Metaphor has traditionally been viewed as the most important form of figurative language, and is usually seen as reaching its most sophisticated forms in literary or poetic language. Until recent times, metaphor was seen by most linguists, philosophers, and other researchers of languages as a linguistic oddity, lying outside the center of their daily occupations. This view can be traced back to as early as Aristotle, who regarded metaphor as “fancy language” used by poets. He found it to be nice, but not necessary. As a consequence of its alleged odd status, metaphor was not deemed worthy of a place at the core of linguistics. Its study was mainly left to the literary critics.At the end of the 1970’s however, landmark publications such as Ortony (1979) and Lakoff & Johnson (1980) completed what may be called the “cognitive turn” in metaphorology. The interests in metaphor and studies of its structure, mechanism, function, effect and cognitive nature have grown rapidly in a broad range of disciplines: linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, education, and science, and many books have been published.Now that many scholars are studying metaphors, it is no wonderthere are several theories advanced for dealing with them. Among the most important are interaction theory (Richards, 1936; Black, 1979, 1985), structure mapping theory (Gentner, 1989), conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1990), and similarity creating theory (Indurkhaya, 1992).These theories differ from each other, but do not exclude each other. Some focus on mechanism, some on nature, some on comprehension, and others on function. Herein, the comparison theory and the substitution theory are classical representatives, and the interaction theory and the conceptual metaphor theory are contemporary representatives. To carry on a cultural study on metaphorical expressions and their translation, a cultural dimension is added to discover certain specific details of life that might be important to a group of people because one of the most important contributions of metaphorical expressions is that they deal with the ideas that matter most to a culture—ideas about life, death, relationships, nature.2.1 Traditional Theories of MetaphorThe classic theory of metaphor dates from Aristotle, whose The Poetics and Rhetoric cover many important aspects of metaphor, including its definition, mechanism, and function. In The Poetics, Aristotle states that “metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else,” and that metaphor is a transference of meaning, “the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on the ground of analogy” (Kjargaard, 1986: 11). Aristotle’s interpretation of metaphor as the mechanism of rename and transference is later developed into “comparison theory”, which dominates the traditional study of metaphor.2.1.1 Comparison TheoryWithin Aristotle’s framework metaphor is viewed as an implicit or indirect comparison, based on the principles of analogy. As for metaphor by analogy, Aristotle further explains that when B is to A as D is to C, then B can be used to replace D and instead of saying B directly, people can render D in this case. For instance, the “wine cup”(B) is to “Dionysus” (A) as the “shield” (D) is to “Ares” (C), thus the analogy allows the term combination “cup(B) of Ares(C)” to replace “Shield (D)”, and the combination “shield(D) of Dionysus(A)” to replace “cup(B)”, and also “old age(B)” is to “life(A)” as “evening(D)” is to “day(C)”, so that “evening(D)” can be called the “day’s (C) old age(D)” and the “old age(B)” be called the “evening(D) of life(A)” or “life’s(A) setting sun” (Luo, 1962:73-74).The nature of metaphor and that of simile, in Aristotle’s view, are the same. Moreover, the function of metaphor is primarily ornamental and a mere decorative additive to language. Therefore, for Aristotle, his followers, and many writers in the following centuries, metaphor is an artistic analogy to achieve colorful expressions. Indeed, the ability to use metaphor receives high praise from Aristotle.2.1.2 Substitution TheoryAristotle’s idea of metaphor as a special kind of device to achieve stylistic effect and to be used in poetry only was inherited and reinforced by Roman thinkers like Cicero, Horace, Longinus and Quintilian. The substitution theory was proposed by Roman rhetorician Quintelian in the first century, and it is the development of Aristotle’s view.The theory holds that metaphor is used in place of someequivalent literal expressions, that is, one word is used to substitute for another. As Quintilian regards it, “a metaphor is a shorter form of simile, while in the latter we compare some object to the thing which we wish to describe, whereas in the former the object is actually substituted for the thing.” A pervasive example to interpret this theory is the sentence “John is a lion”. The “lion” in this sentence is the word that used metaphorically to substitute for the literal expression “a courageous man.” The substitution theory, together with the comparison theory, has exerted great influence on the rhetorical study of metaphor in the following 2000 years and has become the rhetorical tradition of metaphor study. In this tradition, metaphor is viewed as merely one of the tropes on the lexical level. They stress that any metaphor that causes difficulties in comprehension should be avoided, since metaphor is merely a decorative, rather than the essential, element of a language.The Roman thinkers’ definition and treatment contains all the basic elements of classical theory of metaphor. This view is later criticized harshly by Black and Lakoff.2.2 Cognitive Theories of MetaphorIn the past few decades, however, the metaphor studies have undergone a series of radical changes. This transformation is marked by the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, published in 1980. The central thesis of the theory is that metaphor, in its broadest sense, is pervasive and essential in language and thought. Human conceptual systems are “pervasively structured by metaphor, metonymy, and other kinds of imaginative structures” (Johnson, 1995:158). Metaphor is no longer regarded as a figure of speech, but a figure of thought (Lakoff, 1980: 3). It is a cognitive mechanismhelping in the construction of a conceptual world with its own laws.2.2.1 Interaction TheoryThe 20th century has seen the unprecedented development of science. Einstein’s theory of relativity challenges Newton’s classical theory of physics by illustrating the relativity of both time and space. In psychological study, Piaget takes a developmental epistemology, which argues knowledge of the reality results from continuous construction, or the interaction between the assimilating and accommodating mechanism of the cognitive agents.This indicates that an individual’s mind is not simply a reflection of the world, but is created through the interaction between newly acquired knowledge and his pre-existing schemas. Such a relativist view on knowledge and reality shakes the basis of logical positivism—the absolute objectivity of the reality. As a result logical relativism takes its place by denying “any truly vertical epistemological access to reality (Ortony, 1993:1)” and arguing for the constructivity of cognition.I. A. RichardsLogical relativism is employed by Richards in arguing for the relativity of meaning and interpretation. In his opinion, a word derives its meaning from its interaction with context rather than from itself. Its meaning varies with the context. Consequently, nothing can prevent a word form signifying more than one thing. It therefore can be inferred that sentence meaning also depends on its context, as well as its components and structure. For the same reason, both metaphorical and literal expressions have relative meanings. As far as their function in describing the world is concerned, there are no fundamental differences between two expressions since both can represent or perhaps create a possible world of its own.。