Binghan Zheng (Durham): Understanding and Reformulating Metaphors in Sight Translation
Insights from an Empirical-experimental research
Location: School of Modern Languages, Old Library Building, Research Beehive 2.20
Time/Date: 17th November 2011, 16:00 - 17:00
Due to the pervasiveness and importance of metaphor, researchers in China and abroad have attempted to explore its characteristics and operational mechanisms at different levels and from different perspectives (Ortony et al. 1978; Shu 2002). However, current metaphor studies seldom touch upon sight translation (STR), with empirical-experimental studies and analysis being particularly scarce in this field. Based on experiments involving two groups of subjects carrying out two sight translation tasks, this talk aims to share the findings that linguistic metaphors add greatly to the difficulty of performing STR, while background knowledge could markedly reduce the difficulty metaphor poses to STR. The findings offer new insights on metaphor in STR research and provide valuable suggestions for interpreting training.
Dr Binghan ZHENG is a Lecturer in Chinese and Translation Studies in the School of Modern Languages & Cultures, Durham University. His research focuses primarily on contemporary translation theories, in particular empirical studies on the process of translation and interpretation. His PhD thesis “Choice-making in the process of English-to-Chinese translation: An empirical study”, completed in 2008 at Nanyang Technological University, is to be published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2011.
Published: 26th September 2011