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

Abstract

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.