Metaphor In Reports Research Articles

Ideology, metaphor and persuasion in times of elections: a corpus-based study of British and Spanish economic reports

Metaphor has been studied as a pervasive and intrinsic discourse tool over the last decades in many different types of discourse (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Semino 2008, Kövecses 2010, etc.). Considering the strong effect it has on the discourse participants and how it can persuade them towards one side, action, or thought (Charteris-Black 2004, Silaski 2012), it is necessary to study it when the timeframe and the discourse where it is used are ideologically loaded. Based on recent studies on metaphor in economics (Alejo 2010, Herrera-Soler and White 2012, Soares da Silva et al. 2017), metaphor in the press (Koller 2004/2008) and metaphor and ideology (Goatly 2007, Silaski 2012), this article presents a corpus-based study of metaphor in reports of economic affairs in the English and Spanish press during the pre-election week of 2015. The corpus (about 160,000 words) consists of reports published by six newspapers that support different political spheres (left, centre and right): The Guardian, The Independent and The Telegraph in English, and Público, El País and ABC in Spanish. From a Critical Metaphor Analysis perspective (Charteris-Black 2004), the study starts from the hypothesis that the political stand of each newspaper might condition the metaphors. Indeed, metaphors pointing at certain side of political spheres appear in all the sub-corpora of the study, but in distinctive ways, as will be shown. In any case, critical factors such as cognitive and cultural reasons beyond the political stand of the media in question need to be acknowledged as well, which conveys further and more comprehensive analyses.

Foreign metaphors and Arabic translation

This paper attempts to bridge translation studies on metaphor with perspectives from cognitive and critical discourse studies. It provides a new contribution to the study of the interplay between language and politics by investigating the ideological motivations behind choices made by Arab journalists/translators in translating metaphors in reports of world events, in the Middle East in particular. The analytic approach adopted for the purpose of this study draws inspiration from cognitive linguistics, critical discourse studies, and descriptive translation studies. Through a comparative study of a corpus of news representations in Western and Middle Eastern sources, the study scrutinizes the role of metaphor in our perception of reality and interpretation of a news event. Based on an examination of the processing of metaphor in professional translations, the study concludes that metaphors can be classified into two main types in terms of media translation: the cultural type and the ideological type and that each of these is approached differently by translators. The generalized findings concerning these two types of translational patterns are supported by input from Arabic-speaking university-level students of translation studies, in the form of parallel translations by the students and notes on their subsequent classroom discussion.