The Relationship between Grammatical Metaphor and Translation from Chinese to English: An Empirical Study Based on a Personal Experience Narrative Text

Abstract

Grammatical metaphor is one of the important theories in Systemic-Functional Linguistics. Through an empirical study, this paper analyzes the correlation between grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories and the translating quality of personal experience narrative texts from Chinese to English, and the findings show that grammatical metaphor, especially ideational metaphor, and translating quality are significantly positively correlated. Through analyzing the differences of grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories used by learners of English from different proficiency levels, and the findings show that grammatical metaphor and its sub-categories are significantly different except textual metaphor.Keywords: systemic-functional linguistics, grammatical metaphor, translating quality, empirical study Background InformationGrammatical metaphor or GM, which was firstly proposed by M. A. K. Halliday in his book Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985, is one of the most fundamental theories in Systemic-Functional linguistics. According to Thompson, GM occurs when a lexicon-grammatical form does not denote its usual meaning (Thompson, 2004). Liu (2007) classified GM and its subcategories in details (Figure 1). Owing to the limitation of GM internal attributes, related researches of GM are practically focused on ideational metaphor. The metaphorical expression of ideational domain contains two kinds of grammatical changes, i.e. "one is the changes of ranks, the other is the changes of structures (Halliday, 1998)." In line with grammatical changes, researchers classified ideational metaphor from two different aspects. One classification realized the semantic units of sequence, figure, and element by rank-shifting metaphorically. The other classification was based on the metaphorical changes from one semantic element to another semantic element. As to the second classification, Halliday (1998) proposed eleven major GM categories, which correspond to the eleven possible changes between five semantic elements and two minor GM categories (Yang, 2008).There are not few examples to apply GM to the study of translation. Foreign scholars are mainly Hatim & Mason (1990, 2001), Bell (1991, 2001), and Baker (1992, 2000. Home scholars also approached to this field (Huang, 2006(Huang, , 2009Wang, 2006). However, there are very few empirical studies about GM. The reason might be the speculativeness of GM and it is also difficult to approach it empirically. To our delight, there are scholars (Derewianka, 1995;Galve, 1998;Ravelli, 1985Ravelli, , 2003 Byrness, 2009;Yang & Sun, 2012), presently, who are working on this aspect (e.g.: The textual interplay of GM on nominalization occurring in written medical metaphor; Emergent L2 German writing ability in a curricular context; the use of cohensive devices in argumentative writing), and opening a new vision for the empirical study of GM.

Register-based distribution of expressions of modality in COCA

“…9 Registers considered in this study 2010)). In this research, we employed the formula proposed by Heylighen and Dewaele (1999) and also testified by Zhou (2023bZhou ( , 2023c to establish a continuum of formality across registers 10 based on two considerations. One is that the formula counts nouns positively but verbs negatively in establishing the formality of a register, which is in accordance with the argument that nouns are preferred in a formal style while verbs are preferred in an informal style (cf.…”

“…Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014). The former is further subcategorized into modal verbal operators, modal adjuncts, and modal nominalizations; the latter is further classified into 'explicit subjective' orientation and 'explicit objective' orientation (Zhou, 2023c). In this section, key terms in relation to expressions of modality and interpersonal metaphor of modality in SFL, a concept employed to expound the relationship between expressions of modality and formality of registers, are delineated.…”

“…Interpersonal metaphor of modality. Interpersonal metaphor of modality involves the remapping of modal meanings on the semantic stratum onto expressions of modality at different ranks on the lexicogrammatical stratum (Zhou, 2023c). Metaphors of modality, alongside interpersonal metaphors of mood, represent one of two types of interpersonal metaphor related to the ways in which propositions are negotiable or not (Yang, 2019).…”

“…The third line of research documented the distribution of expressions of modality in English across registers (e.g., He, 2020;Zhou, 2023aZhou, , 2023bZhou, , 2023c. For example, He (2020) compared normalized frequencies of specific subtypes of interpersonal metaphor of modality in different registers.…”

Techniques and Accuracy of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor Translation in 'Diary of Wimpy Kid' Novels

“…Grammatical ideational metaphor in translation studies have been discussed in previous researches (Subiyanto 2016;Khristianto 2015;Patrianto 2016;Zen 2014;Dinagara 2016, Zhu & Zhang 2015Dehbahzi S & Nourozi 2015;Fatonah 2014;Zhou 2016;Hu 2015;Jaelani & Sujatna 2013;Tulalamba 2014;and Kazemian & Behnam & Chafoori 2013) but their focuses do not reveal the role of translation techniques and the impact of those translation technique usages to the accuracy assessment which belongs to the translation quality assessment. Their focuses are to explore the translation strategy usage to translate ideational grammatical metaphor using different method and data.…”