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Article In: Translation, Cognition & Behavior: Online-First Articles

Translating war metaphors from English to Arabic in COVID-19 science news articles

ORCiD logo with link | University of Sfax
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Abstract
This paper aims to study how war metaphors in science news articles about the COVID-19 pandemic have been translated from English source texts (ST) to Arabic. To reach this end, a corpus of 94 science news articles from English and Arabic is constructed and analysed using a model of metaphor translation strategies. The analysis has revealed that the metaphor has been largely maintained, and that retention and modification have been equally used by the translators thus highlighting their faithfulness to the ST and adaptation to the target language (TL) culture and norms. Cases of modification have been related to valuing positiveness in the Arab culture and to the preference for formal and embellished style in the TL genre and register.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Conceptual metaphor: war metaphor as a focus
    • 2.2The discourse of popular science during the pandemic
    • 2.3Metaphor translation strategies
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Corpus presentation
    • 3.2Metaphor identification
    • 3.3Validation and inter-rater reliability test
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Retention
    • 4.2Modification
      • 4.2.1Modification of the metaphorical linguistic expressions
      • 4.2.2Modification of the conceptual metaphor
    • 4.3Non-metaphorical renderings
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
References (55)
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