Patterns of translation of metaphor in annual reports in American English and Mexican Spanish

Abstract

he main aim of this study is to identify patterns of translation between American English and Mexican Spanish of metaphors in the specialist language of economics, more specifically in the LSP of annual reports, using a bidirectional American English ⇔ Mexican Spanish parallel electronic corpus compiled specifically for the purpose. The chosen framework is Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) since it brings a new perspective: the study of metaphor in translation is no longer simply a matter of finding linguistic correspondences between two different languages, but of finding correspondences between two conceptual systems corresponding to two different cultures. Annual reports are one of the most frequent means of communication between companies and between companies and their shareholders, investors and financial authorities leading to a growing demand for their translation. Nevertheless, little or no attention has been paid to the study of annual reports from a translation perspective. Starting from the identification of linguistic metaphors and their underlying conceptual metaphors in the chosen source texts (US English; MX Spanish), the study sets out to explore how the linguistic metaphors identified are translated in the target texts (MX Spanish; US English) and whether the translations of the linguistic metaphors from the source texts (ST) are also instantiations of same conceptual metaphor as in the STs. Other possibilities include instantiations of a different conceptual metaphor, or the neutralisation of the metaphor. The method used to process the Bidirectional US English⇔ MX Spanish Parallel Corpus (BESPC) is based on the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) proposed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007), which has been extended for the purposes of this study to accommodate semi- automatic procedures for the identification of linguistic metaphors in running text and to infer conceptualmetaphors. The study reveals three patterns of metaphor translation, one anticipated and two new patterns. With regard to the conceptual analysis, no cultural differences are identified in the transfer of conceptual metaphors. The analysis also demonstrates that the extended MIP can be used to identify metonymy-motivated conceptual metaphors despite the fact that the procedure was not designed for that purpose. The first and foremost contribution of this study is that two new patterns of translation of metaphors have been identified. Another important contribution is that the extended MIP allows the semi-automatic identification of linguistic metaphors in a large data resource as well as the inference of the underlying conceptual metaphors in a systematic way. A ready-to-use bidirectional parallel specialised corpus of US English and MX Spanish is also a valuable output of this work for studying other issues in Translation Studies.