A Study on the Category Transformation of Conceptual Metaphor Translation in Academic Literature

Conceptual metaphor theory is a cognitive means of reflecting thinking problems through language, that is, a systematic mapping from a specific conceptual domain (source domain) to an abstract conceptual domain (target domain). Since its proposal in the 1980s, it has been widely applied in fields such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and has had a profound impact on translation research. There may be significant differences in the expression of conceptual metaphors in different language and cultural backgrounds. This article takes Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory and its translated version “Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory” as the corpus, focusing on the phenomenon of conceptual metaphors in academic literature and their translation. It analyzes and explores how to maintain the conceptual mapping of the source language and the cultural adaptation of the target language in the translation process from the four aspects of structure, category, unit, and internal system included in the category shift theory, in order to provide reference for similar practices and research in the future.