Metaphor in Literary Prose and its Cross-Cultural Transfer: A Case Study of Jinpingmei and its Two English Versions

Abstract

The classic novel Jinpingmei constitutes a rich source of metaphorical expressions, which poses a challenge to interlingual translation. This paper conducts a descriptive analysis of the translation of metaphor from Chinese to English, taking Jinpingmei and its two English versions as the case study. It attempts to examine how and to what extent metaphorical language in the novel is mediated and rendered in the target language, to look at the effect of translative strategies used on the target text and its readers, and to pinpoint factors that motivate translators’ choices. Following the paradigm of descriptive translation studies, the paper resorts to a mixed method design which combines qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The results show that translators adopt a wide variety of transferring strategies to handle metaphors identified in the novel, ranging from deletion to paraphrasing and completely retaining metaphors. While metaphors are all preserved in Roy’s translation, there are many that suffer from loss or displacement to varying degrees in Egerton’s translation. Translators’ choice of different strategies exerts an effect on the images, figurative senses, metaphoricity, and cultural implications of individual metaphors in the source text, which exhibits their disparate considerations respecting the literariness of the original work and the target recipients’ needs and tastes. Finally, the present study demonstrates that metaphor translation is mainly influenced by individual translators’ translatorial skopos as well as their weighing up of prioritizing certain metaphors over others in the text in relation to its intention.