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Lost (and found) in translation : A study of the translation of metaphors and metonymies in a Scottish travel guide

During the last few decades, the translation of metaphors has been a popular focus for examination. Seemingly, the challenges that metaphors and metonymies pose have urged several scholars to compile sets of translation strategies in order to meet them or at least attempt to describe how they tend to be met. This study contributes to the research of how metaphors and metonymies are translated by examining the retention of conventional metaphors and metonymies and the distribution of different translation strategies in a Swedish translation of an excerpt from a Scottish travel guide. According to previous studies, metaphors are powerful instruments of persuasion, especially in travel literature, which essentially serves to sell a destination to its readers. The findings show that translating a metaphor or metonymy into a non-metaphorical or non-metonymical paraphrase is the most frequently utilized strategy, indicating that the images evoked by the metaphors and metonymies are difficult to transfer intact into a target text. Restrictions of semantic relationships and differences in cultural associations are among the possible factors found to influence the choice of strategies. Nevertheless, reproduction of source text metaphors and metonymies, and compensation were found to be the second and third most frequent strategies. While reproduction was expected due to the cultural similarities between English and Swedish, the relative frequency of compensations was less so, but perhaps motivated because of the overall loss of metaphors and metonymies in the translation.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-116157
Date January 2022
CreatorsNyberg, Hanna
PublisherLinnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR)
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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