A Corpus-based Study of Metaphors in the Translated English Texts of Caigentan

Abstract

Caigentan 菜根谭 (Vegetable Roots Discourse), a Chinese classic of Ming Dynasty, stresses self-cultivation and self-admonition with thoughts deep-rooted in Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism through metaphors.  This research focuses on metaphors related to the key concepts of the book and adopts Critical Metaphor Analysis to facilitate the analysis of metaphors related to ‘de德’ (virtue) and ‘xin心’ (heart) in the translated English texts of Caigentan. The study aims to identify the meaning associations of de and xin and the cultural implications in comparison to the original work. Ten categories of de metaphors and twelve categories of xin metaphors are identified, and they are assigned with several human and natural metaphorical images including water, object, container, plant, soil, human, etc. Further comparison reveals that: 1) de and xin share some common characteristics such as variability, powerfulness and the need for cultivation; 2) de owns material property and invisibility while xin has spatial property and visibility; 3) de needs continuous accumulation to reach the ideal state whereas xin requires reduction and purification to achieve perfection. Furthermore, metaphor could be a process of meaning interpretation rather than meaning reflection of the source to the target domain. With the corpus-based approach, this article provides a methodological frame for metaphor studies and enriches literary studies from a metaphorical perspective. Meanwhile, it may also facilitate the exploration of cultural differences between China and the West.