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Judged from the above, the translator serves in the translation process far more than a match-maker, servant or cultural porter .The translator is a truly literary writer, who deserves an equal recognition as any other author with regard to the vigorous and creative efforts contributed to the translation literature.
3 Conceptual Metaphor
3.1 The Definition of Conceptual Metaphor
According to George Lakoff, metaphor consists of not only simile, personification, metonymy, irony and other figurative forms, but also many traditionally literal expressions. For example, the following highly conventionalized expression in daily English used in description of "love" is regarded as metaphorical by Lakoff (1980: 115):
a. Look how far we have come.
b. It's been a long, bumpy road.
c. We can't turn back now.
d. We are at a crossroad.
e. We may have to go our separate ways.
f. We're spinning our wheels.
g. The relationship is not going anywhere.
h. Our relationship is off the tracks.
i. The marriage is on rocks.
Lakoff maintains that all the above expressions about LOVE are governed by a conceptual metaphor: LOVE IS A JOURNEY. Conceptual metaphor is a system of metaphor that lies behind much of everyday language and structures our everyday conceptual system, including most abstract concepts. The actual linguistic phrases, like the above examples, that realize or instantiate the conceptual metaphor are linguistic metaphors or metaphorical expressions. In this theory, metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain mapping from the domain to the source domain in the conceptual system. Its focus is not in language at all. But in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another. According to Lakoff and Johnson's statistics, more than seventy percent of English expressions are derived from such metaphorical concept, so it can reasonably concluded that they permeate almost all the aspects of our life and are indeed what we live by.
3.2 Characteristics of Conceptual Metaphor
The embodied nature of metaphor proves that metaphorical expressions can reflect the reality and metaphorical expressions should correspond to the physical experiences. In this section, three main characteristics of conceptual metaphor will be discussed.
3.2.1 Universality
Conceptual metaphor is rooted and constructed on the basis of recurring physical experiences shared by all the humans. Since the experiences are universal, metaphors based on them should also be universal in nature. Metaphors are pervasive in our daily life, not just in language but in thought and action (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 116). They provide evidence for the universality of metaphor from the analysis of a large number of daily expressions. Metaphor is in nature a cognitive tool because it constructs concepts by mapping an abstract target domain onto the concrete source domain. This tendency is also universally shown in different languages. For instance, in English more is "up" and less means "down", and in Chinese it has the same meaning. In daily life, we are familiar with these pervasive experiences because we encounter them thoroughly every day. In addition, these experiences bear the features of structural correspondences between the domain of quality and the domain of verticality, which lays a foundation for the correspondences in the metaphorical expressions. From this point of view, cognition is naturally embedded. Accordingly, the conventional metaphors are grounded in the embedded experiences.
In general, metaphor constructs the human cognitive system and is used by everyone consciously and automatically in the daily communication, thus further strengthening the pervasiveness of metaphor. Therefore, we cannot live without metaphors and our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.