A study on the Metaphor Translation in Xi Jinping: The Governance of China from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory

Abstract

Metaphors are frequently used in Chinese political discourses to express complex meanings and specify abstract ideas for better public perception. Therefore, strategies used in translating these metaphors can directly affect western readers' understanding of Chinese political thoughts and ideas. Xi Jinping: Governance of China collected speeches, and talks scripts of Xi Jinping since 2012. It epitomizes Chinese political discourses and offers a wide range of metaphors in Chinese political settings. This study aims to explore translation strategies used in metaphors in Xi Jinping: Governance of China under the perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory. After identifying the major metaphors with the method of MIP (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) based on the SISU online bilingual corpus, the author classifies these metaphors as journey metaphors, engineering metaphors, war metaphors, plant metaphors, illness metaphors, etc. Then, the author analyzes translation strategies used within and discusses how translation guided by these strategies helps readers of the target language achieve a similar or even the same response as the reader of the source text. In the end, three translation strategies are proposed: translating into the same metaphor in the target language, replacing metaphor in the source text with metaphor in the target text, and Translating metaphors into non-metaphorical expression.