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Translating The Metaphors We Live By
No full textMONTI Enrico, « Translating the Metaphors We Live By: Intercultural Negotiations in Conceptual Metaphors », European Journal of English Studies (EJES), Vol. 13, Issue 2, 2009, p. 207-221 [rpt. : Ian MacKenzie (sous la direction de), Intercultural Negotiations, London / New York, Routledge, 2011].Lakoff and Johnson’s groundbreaking Metaphors We Live By (1980) has been widely translated. Drawing on a corpus of three translations into Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish), the study considers the cross-cultural productivity of conceptual metaphors, as well as the intercultural negotiations at play in the translation process. While most conceptual metaphors seem to cut across these closely-related cultures, their linguistic realizations still present a significant degree of variation
Tradurre Figure/ Translationg Figurative Language
No full textIntroduction
The book we are pleased to present here offers 27 original contributions to the interlingual translation of figurative language. The chapters are issued from an international conference held at the University of Bologna in December 2012 and have been selected through a double peer-reviewed process.
Why figurative language in translation? Essentially because figurative language – and the contributions in this book do prove it – may often foreground the complexities of the translation process, as well as the strong link between language and culture that this process has to renegotiate. Metaphors, similes, metonyms, synecdoches, hyperboles, personifications, proverbs are figures of speech which, far from being peculiar to literary discourse, have stylistic and cognitive functions in different types of discourse. We need only think of the importance of metaphor in scientific models, of hyperbole in advertising, metonymy in journalism, simile and metaphor in political speeches and touristic texts. Besides making different types of discourse livelier and more expressive, these figures of speech often forge a privileged relationship between addresser and addressee, based on their shared background of linguistic and cultural references.
Translating figurative language invariably implies translating the culture which produced that language, if we allow that any language-culture lives by its metaphors (Bildfeld in Weinrich’s terms) and that those metaphors are far from being universal. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) convincingly argued that our linguistic metaphors are often the byproduct of a deeper analogical mental structure, which allows us to know and define the world around us in terms of what we know better. Their work has initiated a rich field of research within the framework of cognitive linguistics, involving metaphor identification (e.g. Steen and Pragglejaz Group) and the intercultural implications of conceptual metaphors (e.g. Kövecses).
It is precisely this density of linguistic and cultural factors in figurative language which proves so challenging in the passage from one language to another: it is not by chance that some scholars (Dagut 1976; Broeck 1981) locate figurative language (namely metaphors) at the limits of translatability, if not beyond. Translators have the task of adapting the world-view which has produced these instances of figurative language into the cultural paradigm of the target-culture, and to do so while preserving that combination of force and levity which is a prerogative of figurative language.
This of course implies that the translator has first to establish priorities among the different functions that figurative language plays in the source text, and the associations that such images can activate in the mind of the reader. This must be done before choosing which of these to privilege in the not-so-rare cases of asymmetry between the two language-cultures involved. One may think for example of the difficulty of translating the catachreses of one language – metaphors once original and now more or less dormant as they have become part of everyday language – once they are re-activated in some specific poetic or ludic context, as quite often happens in literature, as well as, for instance, in journalism and advertising.
These are only some of the issues which are dealt in good detail in the following chapters. Written in either English or Italian, the following contributions investigate the topic from a wide range of approaches. No boundaries were put as to possible language pairs, nor on possible research frameworks (linguistic, literary, cognitive, stylistic, corpus-based, interdisciplinary approaches), as far as the interlingual translation of figurative language was addressed. This is why the volume offers a rich diversity of languages (as either source or target languages of the different case-studies), including Chinese, Czech, French, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.
These contributions are organized into three main sections, labelled as: Theory, Specialized Translation, Literary Translation. The first section is devoted to theoretical reflections on the issue of translating figurative language, and it is opened by the inaugural speech Umberto Eco gave on the topic of seeing images in a text. The concepts of ekfrasis and metaphor are tackled, as well as the translatability of such visions. Metaphors are the main object of study of the four contributions in this section. Gerard Steen draws on the cognitive linguistic framework he has built up in his Metaphor Lab and adapts it, himself for the first time, to the aspect of interlingual translation. He wonders what is the problem (if any) in translating metaphors, through a few examples ranging from literary translation to interpreting. Zoltán Kövecses also adapts his long-lasting researches on conceptual metaphor to the topic of translation: resorting to some of the reflections he has carried out on the intercultural aspect of conceptual metaphors, he indulges on possible effects this may have on translation practices. Stefano Arduini adopts a translation-studies stance to draw an historical trajectory of the treatment of figurative language within translation studies (and before then). In the end, he advocates for a more courageous treatment of metaphors in translation. Mark Shuttleworth closes this section sketching a parallel between the two scientific domains at stake here, namely metaphor studies and translation studies, arguing for their beneficial interchange, which is what this volume and the conference has aimed at.
Section 2 and 3 contain a series of applied studies on the translation of different kinds of figurative language and they are organized in terms of the (sub)genre involved. Section 2 is devoted to specialized translation, with two subsections on Economics and Politics and Science and Popularisation.
Christina Schäffner – whose paper on the implications of a cognitive approach to metaphor translation has elicited much interest throughout this volume – deals with the translation of economical metaphors within the European discourse, namely within the English-German language pair. Economics is also the subject of Mirella Agorni’s paper, albeit from a more pedagogical perspective, since she offers a case-study of a group of MA students involved in the challenges of translating the ambiguities and irony of figurative language in specialized journalism, with a particular attention to terminology. Sabina Luciana Tcaciuc analyses the treatment of metaphors in a corpus of European Central Bank’s translated texts (English-Romanian), investigating two recurrent conceptual metaphors through the framework of corpus analysis. The section closes on a paper dealing with political discourse in an utterly different context: Paolo Magagnin carries us through the images employed by Chinese leader Hu-Jintao in his 2012 address to the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, and its English translation as it was relayed on the international press, identifying a general tendency to neutralize or undertranslate figurative language. Another contribution to the translation of political discourse is offered by Nicoletta Spinolo, who draws on an experiment she carried out with Masters’ students, dealing with the treatment of metaphors in interpreting political speeches. The constraints seen in other papers are enhanced, in this specific case, by the time-constraints and peculiarities of interpreting.
The following section, Science and Popularisation, is opened by Ana Pano Alaman’s paper on the early translations of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Italian and Spanish. She focuses on the treatment of personifications and analogies, arguably two salient features of Darwin’s rhetoric. Scientific translation, albeit of a more popular type, is also investigated in Marina Manfredi’s paper, which analyses the treatment of lexical and grammatical metaphors in the Italian version of the magazine National Geographic. She adopts the framework of systemic-functional grammar to analyse the translation of the paratextes of such articles. Hallidayan ‘grammatical metaphors’ are also the aim of Yvonne Lindqvist’s paper, which takes them as regulators of social distance in the Swedish translation of popular Anglophone kitchen books.
The third section of the book is devoted to chapters dealing with the translation of figurative language in literary texts. Canadian literature is represented by Patricia Godbout’s paper, investigating metonymy and metaphors in the translation of contemporary novelists such as Anne Hébert and the Nobel-prize laureate Alice Munro. Fabio Regattin deals with the Italian translation of Boris Vian’s ‘langage-univers’, a language rich in creative revitalisations of idiomatic expressions and as such particularly challenging to translate. Two Italian translations of Vian’s novel L’écume des jours are investigated. Renata Kamenicka deals with two opposite tendencies (standardisation/ dynamisation) observed in a corpus of contemporary translated literature (Czech-English) as to the treatment of figurative language. Jane Johnson resorts to corpus stylistics to investigate the treatment of similes in the English translation of a selection of novels by the Nobel-prize laureate Grazia Deledda. Alessandro Niero deals with the figure of repetition in his own Italian translation of Zamjatin’s We (Mы), illustrating through several examples the salience of such features in the source-text and in its translation. Russian literature is also the topic of the joint effort of Gabriella Elina Imposti and Irina Marchesini, who focus their analysis on wordplay as a ‘manifestation of figurative poetry’. Palindromes and other instances of wordplay are analysed in the prose (and poetry) of 20th century-Russian authors such as Chlebnikov, Sokolov and Nabokov.
Poetry is the genre analysed in the following section. Franco Nasi analyses how Liverpool-poet Roger McGough brings back to life dead metaphors in his children poems. Nasi’s own translations are offered and discussed, in their attempt to reproduce the creativity and playfulness of the source-text imagery. Véronique Béghain also deals with poetical creativity (and her own translations of it), but in relation to the poems of American poets Quincy Troupe and Kamau Daa’ood. Several instances of figurative languages (from idioms to neologisms) are taken into account in their tight bond between orality and literacy. Eve de Dampièrre deals with the idea of a ‘figurative grammar’ in Ungaretti’s poetry, and its implications in the translation other poets (French and English) have made. Herman van der Heide closes the poetry section with an incursion into the Dutch tradition: a stylistic analysis of the English and Italian translations is provided of a poem by Cees Noteboom, focusing on the metaphor of the journey.
A final subsection is devoted to fairy-tales and folklore. Silvia Masi has chosen one of the most-widely translated classics of children literature, Pinocchio, to show how its rich use of similes, metaphors, metonymies etc. was reproduced in a corpus of 10 English translations. Metaphors and proverbs are the focus of Angela Albanese as they appear (and quite widely so) in Basile’s Cunto dei cunti, a 17th-century collection of fairy-tales in Neapolitan dialect. A corpus of English and Italian translation of this collection is analysed, highlighting the effects of the translation project in the treatment of figurative language. Silvia Cosimini deals with an often neglected – and endangered – literary tradition, that of Iceland, shedding a light on the folkloric backgrounds of formulaic language. Idioms are a key element of the Icelandic tradition, and the paper dwells on their treatment in the English and Italian translation of Nobel-Prize laureate Halldór Laxness’ novel. Giovanni Tallarico closes this section and the volume on the folklore of proverbs. From a lexicographic perspective, he offers a comparative study of different French-Italian dictionaries as to their capability of providing useful tools for translators.
We are confident that such contributions, in their rich diversity, will contribute to cast a new light on the practice of translators all around the world when dealing with the multifold implications and challenges of figurative language.
Donna R. Miller & Enrico Monti
Bologna, May 20, 201
Translating lexical and grammatical metaphor in popular science magazines: The case of National Geographic (Italia)
No full textThis paper aims at exploring the translation of metaphor, both ‘lexical’ and ‘grammatical’ (Halliday 1985/1994), in popular science texts, dealing with the language pair English-Italian. In particular, it will focus on the paratext, or rather peritext, made up of headlines and their most typical subdivisions, i.e., subheads, the so-called ‘upper-decks’, ‘straplines’ and ‘nut-graphs’, where metaphor plays a major role.
The analysis is based upon a corpus of articles from the popular science magazine, National Geographic, in its American print version and in its corresponding Italian one.
The theoretical background of the study is mainly rooted in linguistics and translation studies, but it also draws on journalism. The paper will start with a cursory illustration of the domain of popular science discourse, followed by a presentation of the goals of this study. It will then move on to briefly explain the notion of ‘grammatical metaphor’ as introduced by systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1985/1994) and to show a taxonomy of functions of titles and headings as presented by Nord (1995, 2012) within the framework of translation studies.
The second part of the paper will be more practical and will focus on the discussion of a selection of illustrative examples from the corpus under scrutiny. It will conclude with a brief overview of results and some future prospects for further investigation.
The final aim of the paper, despite the narrow perspective of the case study, is to establish whether the translation of headlines, and of the interconnected peritextual elements, generally results in a process of ‘re-metaphorisation’ or if a tendency towards ‘de-metaphorisation’ prevails
Translating lexical and grammatical metaphor in popular science magazines: The case of National Geographic (Italia)
No full textThis paper aims at exploring the translation of metaphor, both ‘lexical’ and ‘grammatical’ (Halliday 1985/1994), in popular science texts, dealing with the language pair English-Italian. In particular, it will focus on the paratext, or rather peritext, made up of headlines and their most typical subdivisions, i.e., subheads, the so-called ‘upper-decks’, ‘straplines’ and ‘nut-graphs’, where metaphor plays a major role.
The analysis is based upon a corpus of articles from the popular science magazine, National Geographic, in its American print version and in its corresponding Italian one.
The theoretical background of the study is mainly rooted in linguistics and translation studies, but it also draws on journalism. The paper will start with a cursory illustration of the domain of popular science discourse, followed by a presentation of the goals of this study. It will then move on to briefly explain the notion of ‘grammatical metaphor’ as introduced by systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1985/1994) and to show a taxonomy of functions of titles and headings as presented by Nord (1995, 2012) within the framework of translation studies.
The second part of the paper will be more practical and will focus on the discussion of a selection of illustrative examples from the corpus under scrutiny. It will conclude with a brief overview of results and some future prospects for further investigation.
The final aim of the paper, despite the narrow perspective of the case study, is to establish whether the translation of headlines, and of the interconnected peritextual elements, generally results in a process of ‘re-metaphorisation’ or if a tendency towards ‘de-metaphorisation’ prevails
Traduction et tradition ? Parcours dans le polysystème littéraire européen / Traduzione Tradizione? Paths in the European Literary Polysystem
No full textLa version en ligne date de 2006. Une version papier a été publiée en 2008. MONTI Enrico, directeur des contributions en anglais REGATTIN Fabio, directeur des contributions en françaisLes articles réunis dans ce numéro monographique de RiLUnE analysent le système littéraire européen à partir d’une perspective multilinguistique et facettée, en révélant l’intrinsèque «unité dans la différence» du macro-polysystème européen, condition nécessaire à la réalisation d’une véritable conscience culturelle commune. La traduction a souvent été comparée à une porte ouverte sur l’Autre, une image qui nous permet de prendre en compte plusieurs approches possibles à la question des influences mutuelles parmi les différents systèmes littéraires nationaux. La première section («Inclusion») recueille des contributions basées sur l’entrée (inclusion, assimilation) de concepts, œuvres littéraires, auteurs dans un système littéraire donné, en étudiant la façon dans laquelle cette inclusion contribue à former les littératures nationales; la deuxième section («Dissémination») réunit des articles centrés sur la sortie (diffusion), qui examinent les mouvements centrifuges de concepts, auteurs, ou œuvres qui, à partir d’un polysystème national, se sont diffusés à l’extérieur, sur la scène européenne; une troisième section («Contamination») reste sur le pas de la porte, en recueillant les contributions qui s’interrogent sur la traduction en tant que mouvement à double sens, un mouvement (traductif mais aussi scriptural) qui conduit au plurilinguisme, au syncrétisme linguistique et à l’échange mutuelle entre les langues. Avec une introduction et une bibliographie d’Enrico Monti et Fabio Regattin. Articles de : Özlem Berk (Mugla Üniversitesi, Türkiye), Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, Krassimira Tchilingirova (INALCO, Paris, France), Cristina Gómez Castro (Universidad de Léon, España), Ondrej Vimr (Univerzita Karlova, Praha, Ceská Republika), Maria Orphanidou-Fréris (Université Aristote, Thessalonique), Carol O’Sullivan, (University of Portsmouth, UK), Gilles Quentel (Uniwersytet Gdanski, Polska), Adelino Braz (Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, France), Massimiliano Morini (Università degli Studi di Udine, Italia), Françoise Wuilmart (ISTI, Bruxelles, Belgique), Tal Goldfajn (University of Tel-Aviv, Israel), Sharon Lubkeman Allen (State University of New York, USA)
“...like reeds in the wind”. Exploring simile in the English translations of Grazia Deledda using corpus stylistics
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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