Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation: An Inquiry into Cross-Lingual Translation Practices

Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation presents a multilingual examination of the translation of metaphors. Mark Shuttleworth explores this facet of translation and develops a theoretically nuanced description of the procedures that translators have recourse to when translating metaphorical language. Drawing on a core corpus consisting of six Scientific American articles in the fields of neurobiology and biotechnology dating from 2004, along with their translations into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish and Russian, Shuttleworth provides a data-driven and theoretically informed picture of the processes that underpin metaphor translation. The book builds interdisciplinary bridges between translation scholars and metaphor researchers, proposes a new set of procedures for metaphor translation conceived within the context of descriptive translation studies, and puts forward a possible resolution to the debate on metaphor translatability.