An LLM-Assisted Study on Translating Conceptual Metaphors in China’s Women’s Development Discourse

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_35How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Conceptual metaphor; Translation strategy; Women’s development discourse; Chinese policy discourse; International communication

Abstract

This study examines how conceptual metaphors in the white paper titled China’s Achievements in Women’s Well-Rounded Development in the New Era are rendered in its official English translation. Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the study analyzes 387 aligned Chinese-English sentence pairs and 127 metaphorical expressions identified through a Large Language Model (LLM)-assisted but human-validated procedure. The findings indicate that the Chinese source text primarily draws on source domains of building, journey, and action to frame women’s development as a progressive, structured, and practice-oriented process. The English translation mainly adopts three strategies: literal retention, image transformation, and demetaphorization with semantic compensation. Their distribution suggests a domain-sensitive pattern: metaphors that are conventional and cross-linguistically accessible are more likely to be retained, whereas culturally marked or rhetorically condensed expressions tend to be reformulated. This study contributes to research on metaphor translation in Chinese policy discourse by extending it to the relatively underexplored area of women’s development discourse. It also introduces a transparent small-scale methodological model that combines LLM-assisted identification with manual validation.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Qianrou Lu
AU  - Yazhi Yao
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/13
TI  - An LLM-Assisted Study on Translating Conceptual Metaphors in China’s Women’s Development Discourse
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language and Cultural Communication (ICLCC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 320
EP  - 326
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_35
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_35
ID  - Lu2026
ER  -