Drama Translation Strategies from the Perspective of Metaphors of Mood

Abstract

Halliday proposed the concept of “metaphors of mood” in the framework of systemic functional linguistics. Metaphors of mood refer to the phenomenon that the mood and speech function of a sentence is not consistent. What translation strategies will the translator adopt when translating a drama with metaphors of mood? What is the basis for translators to choose different translation strategies? Based on Mo Yan's drama Frog and its English translation from Ge Haowen, this paper studies the drama translation strategies from the perspective of metaphors of mood. It is found that translators usually choose the following three translation strategies in different situations: using the same metaphors of mood as the source text, choosing the corresponding mood according to the actual speech function of the source text, and using other types of metaphors of mood.