Translational Behaviour at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge: A Multilingual Investigation into Popular Science Metaphor in Translation

Mark Shuttleworth*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

    20 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This study is based on an analysis of 1354 translated metaphor examples drawn from a corpus consisting of the official published translations into French, Italian, German, Russian and Polish of 62 Scientific American articles that appeared between January 2003 and July 2004. It investigates what happens to metaphor in scientific discourse when translated into another language, on both micro- and macro-levels. Since one of the main advantages of a data-rich multilingual study of this kind is that it can potentially produce results that allow us to draw conclusions about this aspect of scientific translation at a high level of generalization, particular attention is paid to tendencies that appear to be common to translators regardless of the target language. The study distinguishes between macro-level mappings and micro-level metaphorical expressions and examines individual mappings and clusters of mappings in the English source text and their renderings into all five languages. It adopts a bottom-up approach, in that all mappings and other high-level structures are posited on the basis of the metaphorical expressions identified rather than trying to fit the metaphorical expressions into a pre-determined framework of categories.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationScience in Translation
    EditorsMaeve Olohan, Myriam Salama-Carr
    PublisherRoutledge
    Pages301-323
    Number of pages23
    ISBN (Print)9781905763276
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Nov 2011

    Publication series

    NameThe Translator
    PublisherRoutledge
    Number2
    Volume17
    ISSN (Print)1355-6509
    ISSN (Electronic)1757-0409

    Scopus Subject Areas

    • Language and Linguistics
    • Communication
    • Linguistics and Language

    User-Defined Keywords

    • English
    • French
    • German
    • Italian
    • Metaphor
    • Polish
    • Russian
    • Scientific American

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