‘Beyond the Grave’: Equivalence of Specialized Phraseological Units Containing Dead Metaphors in an English-Spanish Dictionary of Commerce and Economics

Abstract

This article examines a question of the interest of scholars dealing with phraseology, terminology and translation, namely the task of translating and finding equivalents of idiomatic expressions, such as specialized phraseological units (henceforth SPUs), especially those in which a dead metaphor underlies. Among the unsolved questions that phraseology still struggles with to establish itself as a discipline on its own right there are two hindering factors that are related to terminology and translation: on the one hand, specialized phraseology is an under-explored and a not institutionalized line of research, to the point of being deemed a non-coherent research field (Kjær, 2007, p. 507). On the other hand, phraseology is considered to be a missing training subject in translation academic syllabi (Corpas Pastor, 2003, p. 222). Therefore, this study intends to offer descriptive data that could be used as a starting point for finding answers regarding the identification and even the creation of equivalents for SPUs that include dead metaphors among their lexical components. The aim of this article is two-fold, (i) it will offer a series of linguistic analyses (morphosyntactic and semantic) of the word forms in the SPUs being analyzed, and their equivalents and (ii) it will shed light on the translation techniques (Molina & Hurtado Albir, 2002, pp. 509-511) used to coin the equivalents of these SPUs.