The metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE PLANTS in A Dream of Red Mansions and its translation in Spanish: an analysis from the cognitive perspective

Abstract

The metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE PLANTS in A Dream of Red Mansions and its Spanish translation have not been well studied so far despite of its prominent status in the novel. This article provides a cognitive analysis of the question based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff & Johnson (1980) and Lakoff (1992). The research is carried out on the basis of a Chinese-Spanish parallel corpus containing 160 expressions of the metaphor in question with all the data collected from the novel and its two Spanish versions following a modified version of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP, Pragglejaz Group, 2007). We have arrived at the following conclusions: 1) the conceptual metaphor in question has developed in the original version of the novel a hierarchical network of projections at three levels; 2) there is a considerable loss of these metaphorical projections in the Spanish translations, meanwhile, the more prominent ones in the context are better conserved; 3) around 26.9% of the data registers notable changes and modifications in the retranslation of the novel (Zhao & García Sánchez) compared to its first complete Spanish version (Láuer); these changes demonstrate a higher level of precision in the diction, more awareness of the cultural differences, a greater tendency towards the maintenance of the original metaphor, a better concern with the internal coherence between metaphorical images of the same context and an inclination towards more specific descriptions of the metaphorical images.