Translating conceptual metaphor in popular biomedical texts from English to Arabic

Alshunnag, MBM

Abstract

The current study explores the metaphorical conceptualisations of biomedical knowledge in online articles found in the English/American popular scientific magazine Scientific American and their translation in the Arabic Majallat Al Oloom. The study aims to reveal the translatability of metaphors between the two languages from a cognitive perspective. It seeks to explore the translation techniques that are chosen to transfer the conceptual metaphors between the involved languages.
The Conceptual Metaphor Theory initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980a/2003), is used as the principal theory for analysing the conceptual representation, typology and metaphorical mappings of these popular biomedical metaphors. The Semantic Field Theory of metaphor, proposed by Kittay and Lehrer (1981), is used to identify the source domains and target domains of these metaphors. The Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), proposed by Pragglejaz Group (2007), is used to determine the metaphorical linguistic representation of these metaphors. The discoursal-pragmatic functions of these metaphors are investigated according to the typology of scientific metaphor, suggested by Boyd (1993), whereas the persuasive function of metaphors, put forward by Cherteris-Black (2004), is used in this discourse to identify their pragmatic functions.
An amalgamation of translation methods, suggested by both Schäffner (2004) and Toury (1995), are used to analyse the translation procedures found in the Arabic magazine in order to determine whether the metaphors are retained, modified, paraphrased, deleted, or even if a new metaphor is created in the target texts in addition to new strategies detected in the corpus.

Citation

Alshunnag, M. Translating conceptual metaphor in popular biomedical texts from English to Arabic. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Sep 2, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 2, 2016