A Study on English Translation of Poems and Lyrics by Mao Tse-tung from the Perspective of Metaphor

Abstract

Mao Tse-tung is a great revolutionist, and his poems have always been praised as “A poem wins a country”. Metaphor is a process to understand and experience one thing through another thing, with its core to create undiscovered connections between ontology and metaphor, it is to combine two dissimilar things together. Poems and Lyrics written by Mao Tse-tung are rich in metaphors, this paper compares and studies four English translations of Mao Tse-tung’s poems(translated by Xu Yuanchong, Foreign Languages Press, Wang Huiming and Gu Zhengkun) from the perspective of metaphor at conceptual level, and discusses how translator deal with verbal metaphors and nominal metaphors. The results find that most of the translators choose to retain metaphors in the target language in order to accurately convey the information of the poems, which is suitable to translate metaphors in the poems.