‘Life Is Baseball’ vs. ‘A Vida É Futebol’: the Translation of Sport-Specific Metaphors from English to European and Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Soccer is the most popular sport in Brazil and Portugal, while in the United States (US) it is baseball. An incredible number of metaphors and idioms are generated in the languages where these sports are played. Due to their cultural specificity, such expressions are particularly difficult to translate, and thus constitute a significant challenge for both machine and human translators (HTs). This paper explores the different possibilities available for the translation of metaphorical baseball expressions from English to Portuguese. The study is based on the TV Corpus, plus a corpus previously compiled by the author. The translations produced by three freely available online MT systems (Google, DeepL and Systran) will be compared with HTs used in the subtitles of TV-series, including both Brazilian and European Portuguese subtitles. The results of the analysis show that sports-related metaphorical and idiomatic expressions remain a blind spot for English-Portuguese MT systems.