The Relationship between Grammatical Metaphor and Translation from Chinese to English: An Empirical Study Based on a Personal Experience Narrative Text

Jiangping Zhou

doi:10.5539/ijel.v6n1p171

Abstract

<p>Grammatical metaphor is one of the important theories in Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Through an empirical study, this paper analyzes the correlation between grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories and the translating quality of personal experience narrative texts from Chinese to English, and the findings show that grammatical metaphor, especially ideational metaphor, and translating quality are significantly positively correlated. Through analyzing the differences of grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories used by learners of English from different proficiency levels, and the findings show that grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories are significantly different except textual metaphor.</p>

Highlights

InformationGrammatical metaphor or GM, which was firstly proposed by M
This paper analyzes the correlation between grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories and the translating quality of personal experience narrative texts from Chinese to English, and the findings show that grammatical metaphor, especially ideational metaphor, and translating quality are significantly positively correlated
Through analyzing the differences of grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories used by learners of English from different proficiency levels, and the findings show that grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories are significantly different except textual metaphor

Summary

Introduction

Grammatical metaphor or GM, which was firstly proposed by M. Owing to the limitation of GM internal attributes, related researches of GM are practically focused on ideational metaphor. The metaphorical expression of ideational domain contains two kinds of grammatical changes, i.e. “one is the changes of ranks, the other is the changes of structures (Halliday, 1998).”. In line with grammatical changes, researchers classified ideational metaphor from two different aspects. One classification realized the semantic units of sequence, figure, and element by rank-shifting metaphorically. The other classification was based on the metaphorical changes from one semantic element to another semantic element. As to the second classification, Halliday (1998) proposed eleven major GM categories, which correspond to the eleven possible changes between five semantic elements and two minor GM categories (Yang, 2008)

Methods

Results

Conclusion