Metaphors and translation: A comparative analysis of metaphors in a business magazine

Abstract

Although economic texts are generally examined in terms of their specialized discourse, they include numerous conceptual metaphors that conceptualize economy or economy-related issues in different ways. These metaphors serve various functions such as decreasing ambiguity and incomprehensibility in economic discourse. For these reasons, metaphors have become an important constitutive part of the analysis of economic texts. Similarly, translation of metaphors in economic discourse has attracted the attention of a growing number of translation scholars in recent years. This study aims to make a contribution to the study of metaphor and metaphor translation, focusing on the most frequent metaphorical expressions in a widely read multinational business magazine, Fortune. After identifying the types of metaphors in the source texts, they have been compared to their translated versions in order to analyze translation strategies and their effectiveness in terms of rendering the metaphoricity in the target texts. In order to describe the procedures used by the translators to render metaphorical expressions, the theoretical framework proposed by Peter Newmark (2007) for translating metaphor has been adopted. As a result of a detailed analysis, it has been found out that the most frequently used translation procedures are converting the metaphor into sense and reproducing the same image in the target language. On the whole, it can be concluded that the translators have had difficulty in retaining some of the metaphors and hence resorted to rendering their meaning in the target text. For this reason, it is possible to claim that translation of metaphors create a linguistic constraint for translators working on economic texts.