Metonyms and Metaphors in Yami Bible Translation

• Main Authors: Ya-Chun Tseng, 曾雅君
• Other Authors: Victoria Rau
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/14525162029610297551

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 語言學研究所 === 103 === This study aimed to investigate the four gospels in Yami Bible translation to examine how the Yami Bible interprets complicated concepts which are not present in the Yami language system, and also seek to understand how Yami culture influences the structure of metaphorical concepts. Yami is a language in the Philippine branch of the Austronesian language family (Rau & Dong, 2006; Dong, Rau, and Chang, 2012). The native speakers of Yami dwell on Orchid Island, which is off the southeastern coast of Taiwan. Yet, the Yami Bible (New Testament) is the only literature in common use among the Yami, but few scholars have investigated the metaphorical phenomena from the perspective of cognition. Thus, this study used the Yami Bible as our data source, narrowing the research scope to the four gospels. The study adopted Radden & Kovecses (1999) and Ungerer & Schmid’s (2008) metonymy theory, and Fauconnier & Turner’s (2002) conceptual blending theory to analyze the metonymys and metaphors in Yami bible translation. The results reveal that when one concept in Chinese or English may have no lexical representations in Yami or vice versa, translators usually employ two strategies. The first strategy is borrowing. The second strategy is using an existing Yami lexical item in place of the concept not in Yami. Also, the substitution often relates to metonymy (including common metonymy and symbolic metonymy). For example, the illustrations of common metonyms are ‘haneng,’ ‘oil’ to indicate ‘perfume,’ ‘kanekanen,’ ‘food,’ to stand for ‘banquet.’ Symbolic metonyms are ‘baka,’ ‘ox,’ to indicate ‘donkey.’ In addition, examples of metaphors using mustard seeds, yeast, cows and donkies were also discussed. We found that the Yami Bible follows two principles when using A (a familiar concept or thing) to replace B (an unfamiliar concept or thing). First, A and B must have some similarity, which might lie in their forms, purposes, or internal characteristics. Second, the Yami people must be familiar with A, which is used to substitute for B. Finally, the paper systematically constructs a cross-cultural comprehensive model of metaphor in Bible translation, and hopes to provide a blueprint for further studies of the ontologies of endangered languages.