Metaphorical Expressions in Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" and their Translation into Albanian (original) (raw)
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Comparative study of metaphor in literary texts and their translations
5th International e-Conference on Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences: Conference Proceedings, 2020
Since Aristotle metaphor was relegated to the domain of literature, until the revolution instantiated by Lakoff and Johnson in the 1980s showed its pervasiveness in language and thought, but paradoxically, it alienated metaphor research from poetics. The latter has slowly been finding its feet in conceptual metaphor studies and with the new development of corpus research, obtained ample material for cross-cultural analysis especially with the help of parallel texts studies – an efficient way to delve into linguistic and culturally-defined differences. The aim of the research is by identifying the conceptual metaphor behind the metaphorical linguistic expressions in key texts from five of the greatest stylists of the English language, and by comparing them to their translations into Bulgarian, to check whether metaphor is lost or transformed in any way. Conclusions are made regarding literature in translation, suggesting cases in which it is comparable to original writing in terms of...
The Metaphor in Literature and the Effect on Translation
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2020
As Dagut (1976: 32) pointed out, the particular cultural experiences and semantic associations exploited by translation and the extent to which these can, or cannot, be produced non-anomalously into the target language, depending on the degree of overlap in each particular case, constitute the basis for the translatability of a metaphor. Snell-Hornby (1995: 41) stated that the extent to which a text is translatable varies with the degree to which it is embedded in its own specific culture. This paper focuses on the translation of metaphor as a cultural concept. It is based on Newmark’s (1982: 84-95) theory of translation and uses Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as the corpus for metaphor analysis. Through contrastive analysis we aim to discover and we highlight the ways in which metaphors in an English fictional text are rendered in Greek and German. Linguistic frames and cultural images and influences are taken into account by comparing the metaphorical reproductions in Ge...
Chapter 2: Analysing Metaphor in Texts
It is now accepted as axiomatic that metaphor pervades all kinds of human discourse, and popular scientific texts are no exception. Indeed, such texts often contain a remarkable number of metaphorical expressions, metaphor in popular science fulfilling a number of different functions. This thesis involves a text-based analysis of nearly 1400 translation examples drawn from a corpus consisting of the official published translations into French, Italian, German, Russian and Polish of 62 Scientific American articles that appeared between January 2003 and July 2004. It aims to provide a broadly qualitative analysis of the kinds of solution that translators commonly resort to in rendering both single metaphorical expressions and entire underlying structures. One of the main advantages of such a data-rich multilingual study is that it can potentially produce results that allow one to draw conclusions about a particular aspect of translation at a high level of generalisation, and this is a benefit that the work seeks to exploit. The approach adopted is inductive, and the thesis offers a categorisation of source-text metaphorical expressions along the lines of the following seven parameters: mapping, typological class, provenance, richness, level of categorisation, purpose and conventionality. Of these, three are used to produce a detailed analysis of the translation patterns contained in the corpus, the use of multiple parameters in this way making it possible to view the data from a range of different angles. Throughout, the work is informed by the insights of translation studies and metaphor studies, and indeed explores the relationship between these two disciplines. However, its ultimate centre of gravity lies within translation studies.
Introduction: Metaphor across languages
Journal of Pragmatics, 2004
The articles presented in this special issue are a selection of papers from the Third International Conference on Researching And Applying Metaphor (RAAM III), held in June 1999 at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. The fourth RAAM conference has since been held in Tunis, in 2001, and the fifth, in September 2003, in Paris. The continued interest in the applied study of metaphor bears testimony to the fruitful nature of contemporary metaphor research, and to the timely identification of its potential for application by the initiators of the conference series, Lynne Cameron and Graham Low. Their edited book of the same title is the most conspicuous published result of these developments (Cameron and Low, 1999), and the present special issue is a further addition to this stock. The particular focus of this special issue is on researching and applying metaphor across languages, the conference theme of RAAM III. The plenary papers of the two invited speakers, Raymond Gibbs and Cliff Goddard, are included as two seminal examples of doing this type of cross-linguistic research with radically different methodologies. Two additional papers, by Alice Deignan and Liz Potter and by Christina Schäffner, add further to the variety of approaches employed in cross-linguistic metaphor research. The undercurrent of methodological discussion that can be observed in all four of these papers, and that is characteristic of metaphor as well as of cross-linguistic research, is brought out in its full complexity in the last two papers, by Elena Semino and her co-authors and by my own paper. Together, these six papers provide a concrete and rich illustration of the diverging concerns of contemporary research on, and application of, metaphor. Gibbs and his associates focus on the similarities and differences between the experience of desire in American English and Brazilian Portuguese. They examine the thesis that metaphor is grounded in embodied experience, an idea that has informed cognitivelinguistic metaphor research from the beginning (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999). What is special about Gibbs et al.'s contribution is its systematic and controlled comparison between two distinct cultures, as well as the way these cultures metaphorically conceptualize and express desire as hunger. In particular, a cognitive-linguistic analysis of expressions relating to desire in both languages first leads to an inventory of hunger metaphors for desire. Then an independent conceptual analysis of the experience of hunger by itself produces a classification of aspects of hunger in both cultures. These conceptual analyses are finally used as predictive categories in a rating study examining how people in both cultures think of and talk about desire as hunger. The overall similarities, as well as some of the differences, are remarkable, and can be seen as support for the view of culture and cognition as embodied experience.
ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics24 (1995)595~04 Translating metaphor: Problems of meaning
Metaphor provides a case study for the problem of the interaction of participants in the communicative act. Metaphor can be defined as a linguistic sign used in the predicative function outside its normal usage as determined by the code. Metaphorical sense emerges through exploiting the set of associations that accompany linguistic elements in the consciousness of code users. This pragmatic material is a more amorphous complex than ordinary linguistic meaning. The sets of associations fixed in the consciousness of native speakers of a given language make metaphorical communication always extremely 'sensitive' to the communicative context.
Tracing Metaphor Transformations in Translation of Fiction by Type and Density
Open Journal for Studies in Linguistics
Heavily neglected by language scholars and ascribed poetics value only, metaphor was reinvented by Lakoff and Johnsons’ iconic study in the 1980s, which showed its pervasiveness in language and thought. Paradoxically, though, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, especially in its early variants, alienated metaphor research from poetics. The latter has slowly been finding its feet in conceptual metaphor studies, especially with the help of newly developed fields of linguistic research such as corpus studies, which allow for obtaining of ample material for cross-cultural analysis. This paper is an example of such an analysis and aims by identifying the conceptual metaphors behind the metaphorical linguistic expressions in key texts from five of the greatest stylists of the English language, and by comparing them to their translations into Bulgarian, to find out whether metaphor is lost or transformed in any way. The main methodological tool used in the current paper is parallel text analys...
Metaphors and Translation Prisms
2015
Metaphors, along with similes, are often viewed as translation problems. Many prescriptive guidelines for how to treat them have been proposed, but there is a paucity of descriptive analysis on the nature of the transformation of metaphors, especially between languages that are linguistically and culturally distinct, for example, between English and Asian languages. Furthermore, the study of multiple translations within one language is even more limited. The present paper descriptively analyzes multiple English translations of the same Japanese literary text published in the past century. It shows that: i) a metaphor's life can be ceased or revived; ii) a metaphor's strength, markedness, linguistic state, pragmatic domain, and sociocultural base may change; iii) explicit metaphors and implicit metaphors interact; iv) a metaphor may be deleted or newly created, through translation. These findings empirically show that metaphors are open expressions with some room to be filled, left open, eliminated, or altered through translation, and thus they can serve as venues for varied translation approaches.
Metaphor: The Impossible Translation?
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2001
The linguistic concept`metaphor' has an established place in clinical as well as theoretical psychotherapy. It has been seen as analogous to or even fundamental to the analytic concept of transference. Metaphors have been thought to have a special role in enhancing therapist-patient communications. By contrast, in linguistics itself, metaphor has been relatively neglected, viewed as irrelevant and unscientific. That conventional approach to metaphor has recently been challenged by Contemporary Metaphor Theory. This new theory suggests that language depends upon a largely unconscious system of conventional metaphor. Our bodily experiences are the basis of our understanding of abstract concepts such as emotions and relationships. Novel and imaginative metaphors build upon this fundamental biological structure. The traditional approach placed metaphor, along with rhetoric and, by inference, psychodynamic thinking, at the periphery of science. Cognitive linguistic research is now showing that language is fundamentally structured by metaphorical processes, which enhances the scientific status of psychoanalysis and supports and extends the view of metaphor as at the heart of language and meaning. The butterfly's wings are becoming so heavy they touch the ground almost, they hit the hawthorn and get thrown sideways by the spray from the waterfall miles away. They no longer fold into land only fall splayed. The perceiving of what was familiar needs impossible translation. Every field rolling green has its beautiful crashed aeroplane.
Chapter 3: Metaphor and Translation Studies
It is now accepted as axiomatic that metaphor pervades all kinds of human discourse, and popular scientific texts are no exception. Indeed, such texts often contain a remarkable number of metaphorical expressions, metaphor in popular science fulfilling a number of different functions. This thesis involves a text-based analysis of nearly 1400 translation examples drawn from a corpus consisting of the official published translations into French, Italian, German, Russian and Polish of 62 Scientific American articles that appeared between January 2003 and July 2004. It aims to provide a broadly qualitative analysis of the kinds of solution that translators commonly resort to in rendering both single metaphorical expressions and entire underlying structures. One of the main advantages of such a data-rich multilingual study is that it can potentially produce results that allow one to draw conclusions about a particular aspect of translation at a high level of generalisation, and this is a benefit that the work seeks to exploit. The approach adopted is inductive, and the thesis offers a categorisation of source-text metaphorical expressions along the lines of the following seven parameters: mapping, typological class, provenance, richness, level of categorisation, purpose and conventionality. Of these, three are used to produce a detailed analysis of the translation patterns contained in the corpus, the use of multiple parameters in this way making it possible to view the data from a range of different angles. Throughout, the work is informed by the insights of translation studies and metaphor studies, and indeed explores the relationship between these two disciplines. However, its ultimate centre of gravity lies within translation studies.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2024
The aim of this study is to examine the effects of translating literary metaphors from Serbian to English on metaphor quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity. The research involved 55 Serbian metaphors translated into English using the A is B form, which were then evaluated by 252 participants in two separate studies. Study 1 served as an extension of a previous norming study. In it, a group of participants assessed 55 translated literary metaphorical expressions, and their evaluations were compared to those of the original Serbian versions. In Study 2, a group of participants, divided into two subgroups, rated a collection of both the original metaphorical expressions and their translated counterparts. The results indicate that the translated metaphors generally scored higher in terms of aptness, familiarity, quality, and partially in metaphoricity. These findings suggest that translating the metaphors into English had a positive impact on their perceived effectiveness and familiarity. Several factors are considered to explain these outcomes, including the nature of the English language itself, the participants’ exposure to English, and the translation process. Overall, this study highlights the influence of translation on the perception of literary metaphors and provides insights into metaphor interpretation.