Fortress Besieged is full of all kinds of metaphors. And the metaphors in it are vivid, unique, rich, humorous and eloquent, which have an indispensable effect of creating characters and conveying the theme of the novel.

This novel has been translated into many different versions in different languages, and it was translated into English by Nathan K. Mao and Jeanne Kelly in 1979. Fortress Besieged has been the only English version. In this article, I will take their version as an example, and use relevance theory to make analyses of the humorous metaphor translation.

Metaphor is very common in a lot of languages and it plays an important role in our daily life as well as in literary works. So the study of metaphor and its translation is more and more popular. In recent decades, metaphor is hotly discussed with many domestic and overseas scholars researching into it, now it extends to the study of metaphor translation. 

Metaphor is culturally specific and its understanding is based on the readers’ appreciation and response. The translatability and untranslatability of metaphor are closely related to the two cultural environments. A variety of theories are used to study metaphor, but we can’t say which one is better.

In this thesis the relevance theory is employed to look into the translation of metaphors in Fortress Besieged. The author also attempts to arouse people’s interest in metaphor and metaphor translation through the research.

It should be noted that the research focuses on the translators’ treatment of metaphors and the effect of the translation in terms of relevance theory instead of criticizing the translation quality of Fortress Besieged. 

By analyzing metaphor translation we can explore the problem that translators may encounter in the process of translation, and pave the way for those people who will study the translation of metaphor. Meanwhile, it can help us better understand different cultures between two countries.,源^自#751*文·论~文]网[www.751com.cn

 Chapter Two Literature Review

Since my research focuses on the translation of metaphors in Fortress Besieged, previous studies on metaphor in Fortress Besieged and the translation of metaphor will be presented.