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Translating metaphors : an English to Swedish translation analysis based on conceptual metaphor theory

This paper analyzes the author’s own translation of a metaphor dense non-fiction text and investigates how metaphors have been translated from English to Swedish. The analysis mainly draws on Schäffner’s 2004 study that views metaphors on two levels, micro and macro, and Newmark’s 1981 prescriptive framework. The translation of metaphors is a widely discussed topic among translation scholars and it has been suggested by neurological studies that translated texts with lower metaphor density than their source texts have less emotional impact. However, the issue of translation is complicated by the translatability of metaphors as conceptual metaphor theory suggests that our understanding of metaphors is primarily based on cultural experience. The findings indicate that the metaphors in the source text can be directly translated into Swedish to a high degree, and micro-level changes do not always affect the macro-level metaphor. Based on this, it appears that macro-level metaphors at times can remain intact in the target text even if changes on the micro-level are necessary in order to conform to target language conventions. However, due to the study’s limited sample, no firm conclusions are made.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-114142
Date January 2022
CreatorsBlixt, Emely
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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