谚语翻译研究论文

ABSTRACT The development of people's ability totranslate figurative speech was studied, using sentences con­taining metaphors, dual function words, and proverbs, aspresented in classroom workbooks. One hundred twentychildren from first, third, fifth, and seventh grades wereasked to describe the meaning of each figurative word orphrase placed in context. Responses were scored on a four­point scale indicating the extent to which the child used aliteral or figurative translation. Significant effects betweengrade levels and figurative conditions were found, indicatingthat the ability to translate figurative speech proceeds alonga developmental hierarchy of language comprehension. Themajority of third grade children were able to translate meta­phors and dual function words into figurative language suc­cessfully. The ability to translate proverbs required a levelof comprehension that does not appear in most childrenuntil seventh grade, as suggested by recent review of the psychological literature onmetaphor suggests a strong relationship betweenmetaphor comprehension and Piaget's cognitive stagesof thought development (3). Piagetian theory suggeststhat children from seven to twelve years of age developa broad range of transformational skills that allows themto operate on reality, building a repertoire of symbolsand signs (8). This display of cognitive growth representsan enormous expansion of power and abstraction in thatit frees children from the literal aspects of their percep­ and Piaget suggest that the capacity for poeticusage and the ability to operate on linguistic elementsmay be the last facet of language to develop (3). Theauthors' experiences in third grade classrooms, whileobserving children's understanding of figurative speechas presented in reading workbooks, revealed a wide rangeof abilities in the children's interpretation of metaphorsand proverbs at the concrete operations period of develop­ment. Some children had an immediate grasp of the mul­tiple meanings of terms, while others, regardless of theamount of explanation given, could not override theircognitive ties to the literal suggests that the capacity to understandmetaphoric speech occurs at an age beyond the preschoollevel (5). An early study investigated the development ofchildren's ability to understand dual function words,terms that have a joint reference in language to bothphysical and psychological data (1). For example, suchwords as "cold" and "warm" denote thermal propertiesand can serve a dual function in describing psychologicalaspects of people. The authors suggested that these termsare an elementary instance of metaphorical thinking andinvestigated the order in which children's understandingof dual terms emerged. Results indicated that childrenfrom three to seven are sensitive only to the literal trans­lation, while seven- to eight-year olds demonstrate thebeginning of the ability to use the psychological sense ofthe terms. The ability to state the dual function of theterms was clearly developed in the twelve-year-old group(for example, "hard things and hard people are bothunmanageable").Further work examined the ability of preschool child­ren to make metaphoric links, to perceive relationshipsamong disparate phenomena (6). Children, ages three tonineteen, were asked to indicate their knowledge ofliteral meanings of word pairs and then project them ontosensory domains using metaphoric skills. In contrast toearlier findings, these results indicated that the capacityfor metaphoric association between sensory modalitiesand adjectives was evident in young recent investigation found a developmental trendtoward the comprehension of metaphors, though it con­cluded that not until the age of ten were children ableto demonstrate metaphoric understanding of dual func­tion words (12).The ability to understand proverbs has been explainedby Piaget as part of the development of cognitive think­ing (10). He proposed that children from nine to elevenyears of age use a simple projection of the proverb intosentences by process of immediate fusion. At this level,there is no analysis of detail in comprehending proverbs,but a general fusion of two propositions without analysisof their meanings. Piaget believed that this phenomenonprecedes the development of logical thinking, that theability to translate proverbs does not occur until theformal operations present study examined the relationship amongmetaphors, dual function words, and proverbs, specificallylooking at children's ability to translate classroom materialpresented in context. Context has been cited as an impor­