Agency in metaphor and translation: A socio-cognitive approach to deliberate metaphor use in intercultural communication

Cognitive approaches to metaphor translation, particularly those rooted in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), can be seen as overlooking the translator’s agency as they tend to emphasise the conceptual structures of metaphor in thought. As a result, very little is known about the role translators’ agency plays in their communicative decision-making. This article develops a socio-cognitive approach to metaphor translation by integrating Deliberate Metaphor Theory (DMT) with the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to intercultural pragmatics. It proposes a descriptive taxonomy of six variations of deliberate metaphor use in translation (DMUiT). Furthermore, it incorporates SCA’s account of how individual and social traits interact in intercultural communication to explain how translators’ decision-making in metaphor translation is driven by the interplay of their intention and attention. Detailed analysis of non-literary and literary translations of deliberate metaphors demonstrates that this socio-cognitive framework highlights translators’ prior experience, salience, and egocentrism in intercultural communication, hence bringing us closer to translators’ agency. This article concludes by outlining a research paradigm of approaching translators’ agency in metaphor translation from a comprehension-oriented and a production-oriented perspective, with the help of experimental, sociological, and corpus methods.