摘要

隐喻是一种思维方式，也是一种认知过程。隐喻的表达及接受必然受制于一定的历史、文化、风俗和价值标准。习语承载着不同民族的文化特色和文化信息。同时，大部分习语都具有隐喻性。由于不同文化的复杂性，所以在翻译英汉习语中的隐喻时还存在不少困难。本文旨在讨论隐喻翻译中的民族性及其翻译策略，以此促进不同文化间的交流。

关键词：隐喻；习语；认知；民族性；翻译

Abstract

Metaphor is a mode of thinking and cognitive process. The expression and acceptance of metaphor are bound to be influenced by history, culture, customs and values. Idioms carry national cultural characteristics and cultural information. Most of the idioms are metaphorical. Because of the complexity of different culture, there are some difficulties in translating metaphor mirrored in English and Chinese idioms. This article discusses from the national characteristics of metaphor translation in order to promote the cultural exchanges between different cultures.

Key words: metaphor; idioms; cognition; national characteristics; translation
 
1. Introduction

At all times and in all countries, the studies of metaphor have a long history. In the west, the earliest systematic research on metaphor can be traced back to Aristotle. His research theory on metaphor was known as “comparison theory”. Aristotle believed that the main function of metaphor is the modification. In the 1930s, Richard issued a book The Philosophy of Rhetoric in which first proposed metaphor interaction theory. That realized the transition of metaphor research from the rhetoric view to cognitive mode view. Later, Blake developed and improved the interaction theory on his basis. Richards and Blake regarded metaphor as a semantic phenomenon and inspected it in the sentences, which broke down the traditional rhetoric idea that they inspected metaphor only in the vocabulary level.
In 1980, the publication of the book Metaphor We Live by coauthored by Lakeoff and Johnson marked the realization of research on metaphor from rhetoric and semantics view to cognitive view. It is widely recognized that metaphor is not just a linguistic phenomenon. It is also a cognitive phenomenon.