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Metaphors and Terminology in Social Science : A translation and an analysis

<p>This essay deals with the translation and analysis of a text on human rights. The analysis focuses on terminology, figures of speech, idiomatic expressions and oblique translation (modulation). The core of the essay concerns terminology and metaphors (or figures of speech), with the last two parts complementing the first two. For the terminology part Victor H Condé (1999) is the main source, when dealing with figures of speech both George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (1980) as well as Christine Alm-Arvius (2003) are the sources used. In the third part the theoretical source is Rune Ingo (1991), and in the last part Vinay & Darbelney’s (Munday 2003) ideas on modulation are discussed.</p><p>The source text was rich in metaphors. For this reason it proved very interesting and illuminating to discover how many metaphors that we (or at least the translator) may be unaware of that we use every day. In the text there were both easy-to-spot metaphors, for example half-digested medieval ideas, as well as the ones that are more hard to find, for example on what foundations do rights rest.</p><p>It was the terminology that posed the biggest challenge during the translation process. However, several of the terms are used in almost the same form and manner in the two languages, two examples are policy (policy) and regime (regim). The challenge here was if a term was used in the same manner in English as in Swedish and in such cases the Swedish Parliament’s website www.riksdagen.se was very useful. Another challenge has been idioms and expressions since it was sometimes hard to find good translations for them and many times the whole context was the key to finding out the author’s intent. An example of this is keep both feet firmly planted on the ground which was translated into som försöker vara så verklighetsknutet som möjligt.</p><p>Keywords: translation, human rights, figures of speech, terminology, modulation</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:vxu-530
Date January 2006
CreatorsHelleklev, Caroline
PublisherVäxjö University, School of Humanities
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, text

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