On Chinese and English Metaphors of Taste Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory: A Case Study of Taste Word Translation in <i>Fortress Besieged</i>

Abstract

Metaphor is very common in literature. Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) provides a brand-new way to study metaphor from cognitive perspective. This paper applies corpus analysis toolkit Antconc to analyze Chinese and English metaphors of taste based on the corpus of <i>Fortress Besieged</i> written by Ch’ien Chung-shu and its translation by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. It adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the taste words in <i>Fortress Besieged</i> and their translation methods, discusses the similarities and differences between the metaphorical meaning of Chinese and English taste words, hoping to help with future translation practice. Through data collection and analysis, “酸’’(sour), “甘/甜’’(sweet), “苦’’(bitter) and “辣”(spicy/hot) turn out to be the most commonly used metaphors of taste to elucidate the characters’ personalities and experiences in the novel. However, the metaphors of taste in the original text of <i>Fortress Besieged</i> are more commonly used than that in its translation and the metaphorical meaning of taste words is richer in Chinese. Although, there are some similarities between Chinese and English metaphors of taste, there are much more differences. From the perspective of CMT, the metaphors of “酸”, “甜/甘”, “苦” and “辣” belong to the structural metaphors and are mapped from taste domain to the domains of physiology, emotion, life, sleep, visual sense, degree, personality and conduct, while the metaphors of “sour”，“sweet”，“bitter” and “spicy/hot” are hardly mapped to physiology, degree and conduct domain. To deal with this, translators can use free translation and amplification translation methods, omitting, substituting the original vehicles in source text or adding explanations to achieve functional equivalence during translation.