Exploring Themes in Chinese Science Fiction through Metaphor: A Corpus-Based Study of The Wandering Earth and Its English Translation

The Wandering Earth is Liu Cixin's most renowned novella, widely acclaimed for its domestic and international impact. This chapter presents a case study of the original Chinese text and its English translation, with a focus on metaphorical themes and their linguistic expressions across both versions. We conceptualise one of the central themes in this novella into one conceptual metaphor NATURE IS ABSOLUTE FORCE. By means of a self-built parallel corpus, our analysis reveals that this metaphorical theme is an extended metaphor throughout the whole narrative expressed by 17 types of linguistic metaphors and other metaphorically used words. The English translation similarly contains 17 types of verbal metaphors and additional metaphorical expressions. Grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), we further analyse the mechanisms by which these metaphors are employed to structure the metaphorical theme, and how the translator converts such metaphors in the target text (TT). This study examines thematic patterns in Chinese science fiction from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, offering a fresh insight into the research on literary themes and providing a new way of interpreting translational behaviours. By integrating cognitive metaphor theories into translation studies, we aim to foster an interdisciplinary study of metaphor in translation as well.