A Study on the Conceptual Metaphor ‘Humans Are Plants’ in the Korean Translation of Water Margin(水滸傳) : Focusing on the Lexical Items ‘Grass’, ‘Willow’ and ‘Flower’

This paper, grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, examines the metaphorical use of ‘grass,’ ‘willow,’ and ‘flower’ in Water Margin(水滸傳), focusing on the conceptual metaphor ‘Humans Are Plants’ and its translation strategies in the Korean version. The study finds that these plant-related images, when mapped onto the human domain, generate various types of metaphors—particularly those related to character traits. The Korean translation adopts three main approaches to convey these metaphors across cultures: equivalent mapping, value-adjusted mapping, and value-shifted mapping. By analyzing these strategies, the study addresses a gap in research on metaphor translation in the Korean version of Water Margin(水滸傳), offering both theoretical insight and empirical support for the cross-cultural transmission of classical Chinese literary metaphors.