Keywords
Positive emotions
Translation of emotions
Submitted : 2023-10-08
Accepted : 2023-10-23
Published : 2023-11-07
Abstract
Emotion is a complex and abstract experience shared by human beings, but it is often expressed in the form of conceptual metaphor which is pervasive in the concrete language. Drawing upon the theory of conceptual metaphor and emotion metaphors, this paper aims to study the translation of positive emotions in David Hawkes’ version of The Story of the Stone and the related daily expressions as the corpus. According to the theories, this paper categorizes the positive emotions metaphors into body metaphors, sensory metaphors, entity metaphors, and orientational metaphors to discuss the process of English translation and the metaphorical mechanism, analyzes the similarities and differences between Chinese and English expressions of positive emotions and their cultural, physiological, and psychological motives, and lastly attempts to summarize the translation strategies of emotional expressions. The analysis of metaphorical mechanisms reveals that the common physiological and psychological experiences of human beings and cultural exchanges give rise to similarities, while the unique cultural environments, antecedents, and historical development of each nation give rise to their distinctiveness. This paper concludes that translators need to make full use of their subjectivity, understand the surface and underlying meaning of the text, and establish a high level of mental compatibility between themselves, the readers, and the author.
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