Challenges and procedures in transferring fully metaphorical terms in the EU’s multilingual institutional setting

Abstract

The use of figurative language in European political jargon can pose a significant translation challenge, particularly given the European Union’s 24 official languages. This study examines fully metaphorical terms such as whistleblower, gatekeeper, and greenwashing, aiming to identify issues of interlingual transfer from English into Italian and Estonian – a rare language combination in multilingual terminology research. Following a descriptive, cognitive approach, the research combines qualitative and quantitative observations of terminological data taken from IATE, the terminology database of the European institutions. The objective is to propose a concrete set of procedures that can be put into practical use by language professionals in the processes of term creation and translation. As a result of analysing the way fully metaphorical English terms are rendered, our study identifies five main interlingual transfer procedures. The findings reveal that direct metaphor transfer, the most common method, is not applied when the transferred metaphor would have culture-specific connotations incompatible with the source language’s unit of understanding. In such cases, the metaphor may be lost, adapted, changed, or the English term borrowed. The study highlights the importance of well-considered terminological choices in multilingual institutional settings where political decisions have a significant social impact.