Cognitive Linguistics-Informed Translation of Metaphorical Expressions in Chinese Ancient Poetry: A Conceptual Blending Theory Perspective

Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in the 1990s, is a cognitive framework that explains how humans construct new meaning by integrating multiple mental spaces—structured conceptual packets containing specific contextual information, such as entities, relationships, and background knowledge. Unlike traditional metaphor theories that view metaphor as a unidirectional mapping between a source domain and a target domain, CBT posits that meaning creation arises from the dynamic interaction of at least four mental spaces: two input spaces (Input Space 1 and Input Space 2), a generic space that abstracts shared structural features across the inputs, and a blended space where selective projection from the input spaces combines with emergent structure to form a novel conceptualization. For example, in the conceptual blend of “time is money,” Input Space 1 contains the domain of money (with entities like currency, transactions, and savings, and relationships like “spending money to gain value”), Input Space 2 contains the domain of time (with entities like hours, days, and schedules, and relationships like “using time for activities”), the generic space abstracts the shared structure of “a finite resource that requires deliberate allocation to achieve goals,” and the blended space merges these elements to produce emergent meanings such as “wasting time is squandering a valuable resource”—a concept not directly present in either input space alone.

This dynamic blending mechanism aligns closely with the metaphorical cognition inherent in Chinese ancient poetry, where poets rely on “bi” (comparison) and “xing” (evocation)—core rhetorical devices rooted in the integration of concrete, sensory experiences with abstract emotions or philosophical ideas—to convey layered meanings. Chinese ancient poetry, as a condensed form of literary expression, often constructs metaphorical networks by weaving multiple conceptual blends into a single verse or stanza, leveraging the cultural and contextual specificity of classical Chinese to create profound, implicit connections. For instance, in Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thoughts,” the line “The bright moonlight before my bed / I took it for frost on the ground” involves two interconnected conceptual blends. The first blend maps the visual input of “bright moonlight” (Input Space 1: natural light with soft, diffused qualities) onto “frost” (Input Space 2: a cold, crystalline substance associated with late night and winter), with the generic space abstracting “a white, reflective surface in a dimly lit environment.” The blended space here generates the emergent perception of the moonlight’s cold, crisp texture, which primes the second, more emotional blend: the frost-like moonlight evokes the poet’s homesickness, as frost in classical Chinese culture is tied to the solitude of late winter and the distance between loved ones. Here, Input Space 1 (the blended space of “moonlight as frost”) projects its cold, solitary qualities, Input Space 2 (the poet’s memory of home) projects the warmth of familial gathering, the generic space abstracts “the contrast between current solitude and desired connection,” and the blended space merges these to produce the emergent meaning of “the moonlight-frost blend triggers a sudden surge of longing for the familiar warmth of home.”

The importance of CBT in analyzing and translating metaphorical expressions in Chinese ancient poetry lies in its ability to unpack the multi-layered cognitive structures that underpin poetic meaning, rather than reducing metaphors to simple lexical substitutions. Traditional translation approaches often prioritize literal accuracy or surface-level rhetorical equivalence, which can erase the emergent meanings generated by conceptual blending—meanings that are central to the poem’s emotional resonance and cultural connotation. By identifying the mental spaces involved in each metaphorical blend, translators can trace the selective projection of entities and relationships, recognize the role of the generic space in anchoring shared meaning, and preserve the emergent structure that gives the poetry its depth. For example, translating the “moonlight as frost” blend requires not only rendering the literal comparison but also conveying the cold, solitary texture of the blend, which is the bridge to the homesickness theme. Without this cognitive perspective, the translation might lose the implicit link between the sensory perception and the emotional core, diluting the poem’s artistic impact. Thus, CBT provides a systematic, cognitively grounded pathway for translators to navigate the complexity of Chinese ancient poetic metaphors, ensuring that both the surface form and the underlying cognitive meaning are faithfully transmitted to target-language readers.

In the context of Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), domain mapping refers to the selective projection of conceptual elements, relational structures, and inferential patterns between at least two input mental spaces—the source domain (a familiar, concrete conceptual field) and the target domain (an abstract or less familiar field requiring cognitive framing)—to form a blended mental space where emergent meaning arises through the integration of non-overlapping elements from the inputs. Unlike domain mapping in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which posits a static, unidirectional projection of a single source domain onto a single target domain (e.g., “TIME IS MONEY” as a fixed cross-domain mapping), CBT’s domain mapping is dynamic, bidirectional, and context-dependent, involving the activation of multiple related mental spaces (e.g., background knowledge of the source/target, cultural schemas) and allowing for partial projection of elements rather than wholesale transfer. This distinction is critical for translating metaphorical expressions in Chinese ancient poetry, as poetic metaphors often embed context-specific cultural and aesthetic schemas that resist static CMT-style mapping.

Li Bai’s line “The Yellow River pours out from the sky” (黄河之水天上来) in Quiet Night Thoughts (though more accurately from Prelude to Water Melody) serves as a representative case. The original metaphor constructs a blending network where the source domain is “sky” (a space associated with celestial transcendence, boundlessness, and divine origin in Chinese cosmology) and the target domain is “the Yellow River’s origin and momentum.” In the input space of the source domain, elements include “celestial location,” “transcendent boundary,” and “unfathomable height”; in the target domain input space, elements include “river source,” “voluminous flow,” and “geographic grandeur.” The original blending network projects the “unfathomable height” and “celestial origin” from the source to the target, while the target’s “voluminous flow” is projected back to the source, creating an emergent structure of the river as a celestial entity with awe-inspiring, transcendent momentum—a meaning tied to Chinese cultural perceptions of the Yellow River as a sacred, life-giving force linked to cosmic order.

Arthur Waley’s translation, “The Yellow River’s waters come down from heaven,” and David Hinton’s translation, “The Yellow River’s waters pour from the sky,” illustrate how domain mapping is transferred or adjusted in translation. Waley’s choice of “come down” softens the dynamic “pour” in the original, while Hinton retains the forceful verb “pour.” In Waley’s translation, the source domain mapping shifts: the “celestial origin” is preserved, but the projection of “unfathomable height” is weakened by the less intense verb, reducing the target domain’s emphasis on the river’s overwhelming momentum. Hinton, by contrast, retains the “pour” and “sky” (rather than Waley’s more generic “heaven”), maintaining the source domain’s “unfathomable height” and “dynamic force” projections. However, both translations face the challenge of the source domain’s cultural schema: “sky” in English lacks the Chinese connotation of celestial transcendence tied to the Yellow River’s sacredness. Waley’s “heaven” introduces a Judeo-Christian schema of a divine, anthropocentric realm, while Hinton’s “sky” remains a neutral physical space, adjusting the source domain’s cultural elements to align with English readers’ background knowledge.

These mapping adjustments directly influence the emergent structure of the translated blending network. Waley’s translation creates an emergent meaning of the river as a distant, celestial-derived body but loses the original’s awe-inspiring momentum, as the weakened verb reduces the integration of the target’s “voluminous flow” with the source’s “height.” Hinton’s translation preserves the momentum but replaces the original’s cosmic sacredness with a more universal sense of natural grandeur, as the neutral “sky” fails to activate the Chinese cultural schema of celestial transcendence. In both cases, the translated emergent structure deviates from the original: Waley prioritizes intelligibility for English readers by simplifying the dynamic mapping, while Hinton prioritizes formal accuracy but adjusts the cultural schema of the source domain. This demonstrates that domain mapping in CBT-informed translation is not merely a transfer of linguistic elements but a negotiation of cultural and cognitive schemas, where adjustments to source-target projections shape the emergent aesthetic and thematic meaning of the translated metaphor.

Image-based metaphors in Chinese ancient poetry rely on sensory, concrete images to convey abstract emotions or aesthetic connotations, with their translation requiring the integration of source-domain poetic images and target-domain cognitive frameworks through conceptual blending theory (CBT). CBT posits that meaning construction occurs in a “blended mental space” formed by four interconnected spaces: the source input space (e.g., the metaphorical vehicle in the source text), the target input space (e.g., the metaphorical tenor or cultural context of the target language), the generic space (shared abstract structures between the two), and the blended space. Three core blending operations—composition, completion, and elaboration—govern the formation of the blended space, each playing a distinct role in translating image-based metaphors.

Composition, the foundational blending operation, involves extracting and integrating discrete elements from the source and target input spaces to form new, emergent structures in the blended space. In Du Fu’s line “桃花一簇开无主，可爱深红爱浅红” (A cluster of peach blossoms blooms unclaimed—do you prefer the deep red or light red?), the image-based metaphor centers on “peach blossoms” (source domain: natural flora with vivid color attributes) and its association with the poet’s casual, appreciative mood (target domain: emotional experience). When translating this line, two versions illustrate different compositional choices: Version 1 renders it as “A cluster of peach blossoms blooms wild—Do you love the deep red or the light red?” and Version 2 as “Unclaimed peach blossoms in a cluster—Which do you adore, crimson or pink?” Version 1 composes the source-domain element “开无主” (blooms unclaimed) with the target-domain colloquial phrase “blooms wild” (a common expression for unmanaged flora in English), while retaining the original color terms “deep red” and “light red.” Version 2, by contrast, composes “开无主” with “Unclaimed” (a more literal term) and replaces the color terms with “crimson” and “pink”—terms that carry richer visual connotations in English. Both versions complete the compositional operation by linking the source image of peach blossoms to the target domain of emotional preference, but their choices of integrated elements shape the vividness of the blended image for English readers.

Completion builds on compositional structures by activating target-language readers’ pre-existing cultural and cognitive schemas to fill gaps in the blended space. Take Wang Wei’s line “小时不识月，呼作白玉盘” (As a child, I did not know the moon; I called it a white jade plate), where the image-based metaphor equates the moon (target domain) to a “white jade plate” (source domain: a traditional Chinese vessel symbolizing purity and elegance). A literal translation might be “When young, I knew not the moon / Called it a white jade plate,” but this risks leaving English readers unfamiliar with the cultural connotation of “white jade plate” (a rare, aesthetically valued object in Chinese culture) unable to grasp the metaphor’s warmth and innocence. A revised translation—“When I was little, I didn’t know the moon; I called it a silver jade dish”—completes the blended space by activating the English schema of “silver” as a luminous, familiar attribute of the moon. The addition of “silver” fills the gap between the Chinese cultural schema of “white jade” and the English cognitive schema of lunar imagery, allowing readers to infer the child’s perception of the moon as a bright, round, and precious object without explicit explanation.

Elaboration extends the emergent structure of the blended space by projecting the metaphor’s implied meaning onto target-language expressive habits, ensuring the translation retains the poem’s aesthetic and emotional resonance. Li Bai’s line “飞流直下三千尺，疑是银河落九天” (A waterfall cascades three thousand feet; I doubt it is the Milky Way falling from the ninth heaven) uses the image-based metaphor of the Milky Way (source domain: celestial river) to exaggerate the waterfall’s grandeur (target domain: natural spectacle). A literal translation might struggle to convey the hyperbolic grandeur in English, so an elaborated version—“A torrent plunges three thousand feet—Is it the Milky Way pouring from the skies above?”—extends the blended space by activating the English schema of “pouring” (a verb that emphasizes the waterfall’s force) and replacing “ninth heaven” (a Taoist cultural reference unfamiliar to most English readers) with “the skies above” (a universal expression for the heavens). This elaboration preserves the metaphor’s implied meaning of awe while aligning with English poetic conventions of hyperbole, whereas a literal translation would leave the cultural reference ungrounded, weakening the emotional impact.

In summary, composition lays the structural foundation of the blended image, completion bridges cultural and cognitive gaps, and elaboration enhances the metaphor’s expressive fit to the target language. Together, these operations transform isolated source-domain images into cohesive, culturally accessible metaphors that retain the aesthetic essence of Chinese ancient poetry for cross-linguistic readers.

Blending operations in translating emotion-based metaphors in Chinese ancient poetry, rooted in Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), refer to the dynamic cognitive processes through which translators integrate elements from the source domain (physical entities) and target domain (abstract emotions) of the source metaphor, while aligning with target language cultural schemas, to construct a coherent and emotionally resonant target text metaphor. Its core principle lies in the interaction between four mental spaces: the source input space (physical entity in the source poem, e.g., "continuous river flowing eastward"), the target input space (abstract emotion, e.g., "sorrow"), the generic space (shared relational structure, e.g., "uncontrollable and enduring"), and the blended space (where cross-space mappings generate new emergent structure). This process is critical for transcending the literal gap between physical and emotional domains, ensuring that the translated metaphor retains both the source’s poetic imagery and its deep emotional connotations, thereby enabling target readers to perceive the same emotional intensity as source readers.

Composition, the foundational blending operation, involves selecting and merging compatible elements from the source and target input spaces to form the initial structure of the blended metaphor. Take Li Qingzhao’s "Sorrow is like a continuous river flowing eastward" as an example: the source input space contains "continuous river" (enduring, unbroken) and "flowing eastward" (unidirectional, irreversible), while the target input space holds "sorrow" (persistent, overwhelming). In Pauline Yu’s translation, "Sorrow flows eastward like an endless river," composition merges the physical attributes of the river (endlessness, eastward flow) with the emotional attributes of sorrow (persistence, inescapability) by maintaining the core mapping of "sorrow as a flowing river." This merged structure establishes the basic emotional logic of the metaphor, ensuring that the target text does not reduce the source’s imagery to a literal description of emotion but preserves the poetic fusion of physical and emotional domains.

Completion, the second operation, relies on the translator’s activation of cultural schemas in the target space to supplement the blended structure with contextually relevant implicit information. The "eastward flowing river" in the source poem carries a specific Chinese cultural schema: in traditional Chinese geography, major rivers (e.g., the Yangtze) flow eastward into the sea, symbolizing the irreversibility of time and the inevitability of loss, which amplifies the sorrow’s depth. When translating this metaphor, Jonathan Chaves supplements this cultural schema by adjusting the imagery to align with English readers’ implicit knowledge—though he retains "eastward flow," he emphasizes the "river’s unceasing surge" to evoke a universal sense of uncontrollable movement, as English culture lacks the direct association between eastward rivers and sorrow. This completion operation bridges the cultural gap, allowing target readers to infer the sorrow’s enduring nature without explicit cultural explanation, thus stabilizing the blended metaphor’s emotional meaning.

Elaboration, the final operation, involves extending the blended structure through target language-specific expressive strategies to enhance emotional resonance. For Xin Qiji’s "Anger is like a thunder breaking the mountains," the source input space includes "thunder" (loud, sudden) and "breaking the mountains" (destructive, powerful), while the target input space is "anger" (intense, explosive). In Pauline Yu’s translation, "Anger bursts like thunder shattering mountains," elaboration is achieved by using the verb "shattering" (instead of the literal "breaking") to intensify the destructive force of the imagery, and "bursts" to highlight the suddenness of the emotion—choices that align with English’s preference for dynamic verbs to convey emotional intensity. This extension of the blended structure does not alter the core mapping but enriches the emergent emotional meaning, making the target metaphor more vivid and emotionally impactful for English readers.

Translating emotion-based metaphors via blending operations faces inherent challenges, primarily the misalignment of cultural emotion schemas across languages. For instance, the "eastward flowing river"’s sorrowful connotation is deeply embedded in Chinese cultural memory, but English readers may only perceive it as a neutral physical description without completion. Additionally, elaboration risks over-amplifying or diluting the source emotion: overly dynamic verbs in English might make the anger metaphor seem overly aggressive, while under-elaboration could render the sorrow metaphor flat. These challenges require translators to balance fidelity to the source’s blending structure with adaptability to the target’s cognitive and cultural context, ensuring that the translated metaphor achieves both semantic accuracy and emotional equivalence.

Cross-cultural blending constraints refer to the cultural, value-based, and cognitive barriers that disrupt the smooth construction of the blended space in Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) during the translation of Chinese ancient poetic metaphors. These constraints arise from the divergence between the source cultural context (ancient Chinese) and the target cultural context (e.g., English-speaking Western cultures), hindering the translator’s ability to map conceptual elements from the source input space to the target input space and integrate them coherently in the blended space.

Cultural schemas constitute a primary constraint. Cultural schemas are shared cognitive frameworks shaped by a community’s history, customs, and collective experiences, and their mismatch often leads to incomplete or distorted blending. For example, the concept of “dragon” in ancient Chinese poetry carries positive connotations of imperial authority, auspiciousness, and power—evident in metaphors like “the dragon soars through the nine heavens” to praise a ruler’s virtue. However, in Western cultural schemas, “dragon” is typically a monstrous, destructive creature associated with evil. When translating such metaphors, the target input space lacks the positive schema of “dragon,” making it impossible to directly map the source’s auspicious connotations to the blended space. A literal translation would evoke negative associations in the target audience, failing to replicate the original’s celebratory intent.

Value systems, as deep-rooted cultural norms, form another critical constraint. Ancient Chinese poetry frequently encodes metaphors tied to Confucian values, such as filial piety—a concept central to Chinese ethical systems but not as explicitly ritualized in Western individualistic value frameworks. For instance, the metaphor “the son’s heart is like a pine tree before his parents’ tomb” uses the pine’s evergreen quality to symbolize unwavering filial devotion maintained even after a parent’s death. In the target input space, the Western value system prioritizes individual autonomy over hierarchical family piety, so the symbolic link between “pine tree” and “filial piety” lacks a corresponding value anchor. This mismatch prevents the target audience from activating the intended emotional meaning in the blended space, reducing the metaphor to a mere description of a tree rather than a testament to virtue.

Cognitive models, the underlying patterns of thinking that structure perception, also constrain blending. Ancient Chinese cognitive models tend to be holistic and intuitive, such as the concept of “heaven” (tian) as an integrated system encompassing nature, morality, and human fate—seen in metaphors like “heaven’s way nourishes all things” to express the harmony between humanity and the cosmos. Western cognitive models, by contrast, are often analytical and dualistic, separating “heaven” (as a transcendent divine realm) from the natural world. When translating this metaphor, the target input space’s dualistic model of “heaven” cannot align with the source’s holistic “tian,” so the blended space fails to integrate the original’s emphasis on cosmic harmony, instead framing “heaven” as a distant, non-participatory entity.

To mitigate these constraints, translators employ adaptive translation and annotation strategies. Take the culture-specific metaphor “the fragrance of osmanthus in the Moon Palace” (a symbol of solitude, elegance, and celestial purity rooted in Chinese mythology of Chang’e). A literal translation would leave the target audience unaware of the Moon Palace’s mythological context, so adaptive translation might rephrase it as “the fragrance of osmanthus in the moon’s mythic garden,” adding “mythic” to signal the cultural background. Annotation, by contrast, could include a note explaining the Chang’e legend and the osmanthus’s association with celestial beauty. Adaptive translation enhances immediate comprehensibility by adjusting conceptual elements to fit the target schema, though it may dilute the original’s cultural specificity. Annotation preserves the source’s cultural richness by supplementing the target input space with missing schemas, but it risks disrupting the poetic flow. Both strategies aim to compensate for the constraint-induced gaps in the blended space: adaptive translation aligns the source and target input spaces to enable smoother integration, while annotation enriches the target input space to support accurate meaning construction. Evaluated against the criterion of maintaining the original metaphor’s core meaning, adaptive translation succeeds in conveying the emotional tone (e.g., solitude) but sacrifices cultural uniqueness, whereas annotation preserves both the symbolic connotation and cultural context, though at the cost of minor poetic disruption. Together, these strategies demonstrate how translators navigate cross-cultural constraints to balance fidelity to the source and accessibility to the target audience.

The conclusion of this study on cognitive linguistics-informed translation of metaphorical expressions in Chinese ancient poetry from the perspective of conceptual blending theory first synthesizes the core findings derived from the analytical framework constructed in the research. Throughout the study, conceptual blending theory has been operationalized as a systematic tool to unpack the multi-layered conceptual structures underlying poetic metaphors, rather than a mere descriptive lens. Specifically, the four-space model—comprising input spaces, generic space, and blended space—has been applied to deconstruct how poets integrate concrete sensory experiences (e.g., natural phenomena like "floating clouds" or "falling leaves") with abstract emotional states (e.g., longing for a friend or lament for transience) into emergent metaphorical meanings. For instance, in the analysis of Li Bai’s "Seeing off a Friend," the input space of "floating clouds" (with attributes of mobility, detachment, and indistinctness) and the input space of "a departing friend" (with attributes of separation, distance, and uncertainty) were found to share a generic structure of "entities moving away from a fixed point," which then blends into a new conceptualization where the friend’s departure is not just a physical event but a psychological drifting that eludes grasp. This deconstruction revealed that successful translation of such metaphors hinges on replicating not only the surface imagery but also the dynamic blending process that generates the emergent meaning—a finding that challenges the traditional literal-translation vs. free-translation dichotomy by shifting the focus to conceptual consistency.

Beyond specific case analyses, this study further clarifies the core operational principles of applying conceptual blending theory to poetic metaphor translation, which can be summarized as three interconnected steps: first, identifying the source and target domains of the metaphor and mapping their respective attributes to establish input spaces; second, extracting the generic structure that unites the two domains to ensure the logical basis of blending; third, reconstructing the blended space in the target language by selecting linguistic forms that activate equivalent conceptual associations in the target cultural context. Crucially, the study emphasizes that the generic space is not a static set of shared features but a context-dependent schema shaped by cultural cognitive models. For example, the metaphor of "moon" as a symbol of "longing" in Chinese poetry relies on a generic space rooted in the cultural practice of "moon-gazing on Mid-Autumn Festival" to reunite with family; in translation, this requires the translator to either retain the "moon" imagery and supplement its cultural connotation (if the target culture shares a similar moon-related longing schema) or substitute it with a culturally equivalent symbol (e.g., "stars" in contexts where star-gazing is associated with distant connection) while preserving the generic structure of "natural object as a medium for emotional projection." This operational pathway addresses the long-standing challenge of cultural untranslatability by grounding translation decisions in cognitive rather than purely linguistic or cultural differences.

The practical value of these findings lies in their potential to enhance the translatability of Chinese ancient poetry’s metaphorical richness, thereby facilitating cross-cultural communication of traditional Chinese aesthetic thought. Metaphors in Chinese ancient poetry are not ornamental devices but the very fabric of poetic meaning, carrying the collective cognitive experiences of Chinese literati. By applying conceptual blending theory, translators can avoid reducing metaphors to literal paraphrases that lose their emotional resonance or over-adapting them to target culture norms that erase their cultural specificity. For instance, the translation of Du Fu’s "The thatched hut is destroyed by the autumn wind" was found to benefit from replicating the blending of "physical ruin of the hut" and "spiritual desolation of the poet"—a process that can be achieved in English by using phrases like "the wind tears through the thatch, and my heart tears with it," which activates the same blended space of "external destruction mirroring internal suffering" in English readers. This not only makes the translated poetry aesthetically engaging but also allows target-language audiences to access the cognitive logic of Chinese poetic creation, fostering a deeper appreciation of its cultural uniqueness.

Limitations of the study include its focus on lyrical poetry from the Tang Dynasty, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to other poetic forms (e.g., ci poetry with more fragmented imagery) or historical periods (e.g., Song Dynasty poetry with more philosophical metaphors). Future research could expand the corpus to include diverse poetic genres and explore how conceptual blending interacts with other cognitive mechanisms (e.g., conceptual metaphor theory or image schema theory) to form a more comprehensive translation framework. Additionally, empirical studies involving translators and target-language readers could validate the effectiveness of the proposed operational pathway in real-world translation practice. Despite these limitations, this study contributes to the intersection of cognitive linguistics and translation studies by providing a standardized, practically oriented method for translating poetic metaphors, and it underscores the importance of cognitive consistency in bridging linguistic and cultural gaps in literary translation.