Translation and ‘similarity-creating metaphors’ in specialised languages
Pedro A.Fuertes Olivera and Isabel PizarroSánchez
Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)
Abstract
This corpus-based research deals with the translation of metaphor in specialised texts. In these texts, metaphor is both a cognitive tool and aesthetic device. Some metaphors, particularly those which create a new similarity, seem to develop into technical terms, and this can cause translation problems. The study focuses on metaphors for ‘inflation’ in English economics texts, and their translation into Spanish. The translation strategies are analysed and their results assessed.
Past decades have witnessed a major development in applied linguistics. Different researchers have published on lexical components of scientific and technical discourse; for example, emphasising that scientific and technical discourse uses a lot of metaphors. As terminological phenomena metaphors have contributed to the development of recent approaches to terminology (Meyer et al. 1997; Cabré 1999; Temmerman 2000). Temmerman (2000),for example, has studied the impact of metaphorical models on categorisation and naming. In her view the cognitive approach to metaphor furnishes evidence supporting two important issues: (i) the lexicalisations which can be interpreted as resulting from metaphorical scenarios help to distinguish between creative and educational metaphor; (ii) in studying the vocabulary of a new discipline it makes sense to look for metaphorical scenarios and to see how the underlying Idealised Cognitive Models (ICMs) leave their traces in a number of lexicalisations. She is claiming, then, that the belief defended by traditional Terminology [ p. 44 ](Felber 1984; ISO TC 37) that “metaphor is only relevant as an aspect of language’s naming capacity” (2000: 163) is inadequate, since many terms are the result of understanding and naming on the basis of a “metaphoric Idealised Cognitive Model” (m-ICM)(Lak off 1987).
References
Bies, Werner
1996 “Thinking with the help of images: On the metaphors of knowledge organisations”. Knowledge organisation 23:1. 3–8.
Baker, Mona
1998 “Réexplorer la langue de la traduction: une approche par corpus”. Meta 43. 480–485.
Bowker, Lynne
1997 “You say ‘flatbed colour scanner’, I say ‘colour flatbed scanner’: A descriptive study of the influence of multidimensionality on term formation and use, with special reference to the subject field of optical scanning technology”. Terminology 4:2. 275–302.
Broeck, Raymond van den
1981 “The limits of translatability as exemplified by metaphor translation”. Poetics today 2:4. 73–87.
Cabré Castellví, María Teresa
1999La terminología: representación y comunicación. Elementos para una teoría de base comunicativa y otros artículos. Barcelona: Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Colston, Herbert L.
1999 Review of
Mio and Katz 1996
. Metaphor and symbol 14:1. 77–80.
[ p. 66 ]
Deignan, Alice
1999 “Linguistic metaphors and collocation in nonliterary corpus data”. Metaphor and symbol 14:1. 19–36.
Divasson, Lourdes, R. Rodríguez and J. Hernández
1996 “Negotiation competence and the non-native speaker”. Gerhard Budin, ed. Multilingualism in specialist communication. Vienna: IITF 1996 167–169.
Dobrzyn´ ska, Teresa
1995 “Translating metaphor: Problems of meaning”. Journal of pragmatics 24. 595–604.
Gramm, W.S.
1996 “Economic metaphors: Ideology, rhetoric, and theory”.
Mio and Katz 1996
: 147–170.
Felber, Helmut
1984Terminology manual. Vienna: Infoterm.
Fuertes Olivera, Pedro A.
1998 “Metaphor and translation: A case study in the field of Economics”. Purificación Fernández Nistal and Jose María Bravo Gozalo, eds. La Traducción: Orientaciones Lingüísticas y Culturales. Valladolid: Servicio de Apoyo a la Enseñanza 1998 79–95.
Henderson, Willie
1982 “Metaphor in economics”. Economics 18:4. 147–153.
Henderson, Willie, Tony Dudley-Evans and Roger Backhouse
eds.1993Economics and language. London: Routledge.
House, Juliane
1977A model for translation quality assessment. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Indurkhya, Bipin
1992Metaphor and cognition. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
ISO/TC 37/SC 1/CD 704.2 N 133 95 EN
1995Terminology work—Principles and methods.
Knowles, Frank
1996 “Lexicographical aspects of health metaphor in financial text”. Martin Gellerstamet al., eds. EURALEX ’96 Proceedings I-II. 789–796.
Lakoff, George
1987Women, fire and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1980Metaphors we live by. Chicago: The Chicago University Press.
Laviosa, Sara
1998 “The corpus-based approach: A new paradigm in Translation Studies”. Meta 43. 474–479.
Mason, Mary
1990 “Dancing on air: Analysis of a passage from an economic textbook”. Tony Dudley-Evans and Willie Henderson, eds. The language of economics: The analysis of economics discourse. London: Modern Language Publications 1990 16–28.
McCloskey, Donald
1983 “The rhetoric of economics”. Journal of economic literature 31. 434–461.
McCloskey, Donald
1985The rhetoric of economics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Meyer, Ingrid, Victoria Zaluski and Kristen Mackintosh
1997 “Metaphorical internet terms: A conceptual and structural analysis”. Terminology 4:1. 1–33.
Mio, Jeffrey S. and Albert N. Katz
eds.1996Metaphor: Implications and applications. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Montero-Martinez, Silvia, Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Mercedes García de Quesada
2001 “The translator as ‘language planner’: Syntactic calquing in an English – Spanish translation of Chemical Engineering”. Meta 46:4. 687–698.
Newmark, Peter
1988Aproaches to translation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Nord, Christiane
1991Text analysis in translation. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
[ p. 67 ]
Ortony, Andrew
ed.1993Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [2nd ed.]
Pavel, Sylvia
1993 “Neology and phraseology as terminology-in-the-making”. Henning B. Sonneveld and Kurt L. Loening, eds. Terminology: Applications in interdisciplinary communication. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1993 21–34.
Sager, Juan C.
1997 “Term formation”. Susan Ellen Wright and Gerhard Budin, eds. Handbook of terminology management I. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1997 24–41.
Sorvali, Irma
1998 “The translator as a creative being, with special regard to the translation of literature and LSP”. Babel 48. 234–243.
Temmerman, Rita
2000Towards new ways of terminology description: The sociocognitive approach. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Walter, Beate
1996 “A comparison of English language text forms from the specialist fields of History and Computer Science”. Gerhard Budin, ed. Multilingualism in specialist communication. Vienna: IITF 1996 359–373.