The Effects of Strengths and Familiarity of Metaphors on the Translating Process

Abstract

Conceptual metaphors refer to a dominant linguistic phenomenon during which utterances are formulated by mapping one conceptual domain onto another. For example, the expression "Look how far we've come" comes from the mapping between the LIFE domain and the JOURNEY domain. Since conceptual metaphors are such a dominant part of our everyday language use, a number of researchers have talked about translation strategies for metaphors. Few researchers, however, have approached this issue from process-oriented perspectives. This paper aims to investigate how translators' thinking processes evolve while they translate metaphors. Metaphorical strengths as well as familiarity of the conceptual domains in the target language were used as the major tools for the investigation. The observations from this investigation were that metaphorical strengths had definite roles in guiding translators' thinking process. and strong but unfamiliar metaphors had the largest hampering effects on translating process. The final decision in selecting translation equivalents, however, was mostly determined by the familiarity with the conceptual domains in the target language rather than the metaphorical strengths.