《Patterns in metaphor translation》.pdfVIP

1 Patterns in metaphor translation: a corpus-based case study of the translation of FEAR metaphors between English and Chinese Ding Yan, Dirk Noël and Hans-Georg Wolf The University of Hong Kong 1. Introduction and problem statement Following the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s ( 1980) influential Metaphors We Live By it has become widely recognized in cognitive science and linguistics that metaphor is ubiquitous in language and cognition: complex and abstract concepts are often thought and talked about in terms of conceptually simpler and more concrete notions. A fairly recent outcome of this research is the realization that there is both cross-cultural similarity and variation in metaphor: some metaphors can be identified in a great many languages, while others are language-specific (Kövecses 2000, 2005). The reality of this makes the question of what happens to metaphors in the process of translating text a very relevant one. To this question there are two sides, one linguistic, the other conceptual: a) how does cross-cultural variation in metaphor affect the translation of metaphorical expressions? and b) how does the translation of metaphorical expressions affect the metaphors they express? A number of studies approaching metaphor translation from a cognitive linguistic perspective have addressed either the one or the other of these aspects. Studies of the first kind are Mandelblit (1995), Maalej (2003) and Al-Zoubi et al. (2006), which all distinguish between a “similar mapping condition” (SMC) and a “different mapping condition” (DMC). In the SMC case the source language (SL) and the target language (TL) use an identical metaphor to conceptualize a 2 p