Tradurre Figure/ Translationg Figurative Language

Introduction \n \nThe book we are pleased to present here offers 27 original contributions to the interlingual translation of figurative language. The chapters are issued from an international conference held at the University of Bologna in December 2012 and have been selected through a double peer-reviewed process. \nWhy figurative language in translation? Essentially because figurative language – and the contributions in this book do prove it – may often foreground the complexities of the translation process, as well as the strong link between language and culture that this process has to renegotiate. Metaphors, similes, metonyms, synecdoches, hyperboles, personifications, proverbs are figures of speech which, far from being peculiar to literary discourse, have stylistic and cognitive functions in different types of discourse. We need only think of the importance of metaphor in scientific models, of hyperbole in advertising, metonymy in journalism, simile and metaphor in political speeches and touristic texts. Besides making different types of discourse livelier and more expressive, these figures of speech often forge a privileged relationship between addresser and addressee, based on their shared background of linguistic and cultural references. \nTranslating figurative language invariably implies translating the culture which produced that language, if we allow that any language-culture lives by its metaphors (Bildfeld in Weinrich’s terms) and that those metaphors are far from being universal. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) convincingly argued that our linguistic metaphors are often the byproduct of a deeper analogical mental structure, which allows us to know and define the world around us in terms of what we know better. Their work has initiated a rich field of research within the framework of cognitive linguistics, involving metaphor identification (e.g. Steen and Pragglejaz Group) and the intercultural implications of conceptual metaphors (e.g. Kövecses). \nIt is precisely this density of linguistic and cultural factors in figurative language which proves so challenging in the passage from one language to another: it is not by chance that some scholars (Dagut 1976; Broeck 1981) locate figurative language (namely metaphors) at the limits of translatability, if not beyond. Translators have the task of adapting the world-view which has produced these instances of figurative language into the cultural paradigm of the target-culture, and to do so while preserving that combination of force and levity which is a prerogative of figurative language. \nThis of course implies that the translator has first to establish priorities among the different functions that figurative language plays in the source text, and the associations that such images can activate in the mind of the reader. This must be done before choosing which of these to privilege in the not-so-rare cases of asymmetry between the two language-cultures involved. One may think for example of the difficulty of translating the catachreses of one language – metaphors once original and now more or less dormant as they have become part of everyday language – once they are re-activated in some specific poetic or ludic context, as quite often happens in literature, as well as, for instance, in journalism and advertising. \nThese are only some of the issues which are dealt in good detail in the following chapters. Written in either English or Italian, the following contributions investigate the topic from a wide range of approaches. No boundaries were put as to possible language pairs, nor on possible research frameworks (linguistic, literary, cognitive, stylistic, corpus-based, interdisciplinary approaches), as far as the interlingual translation of figurative language was addressed. This is why the volume offers a rich diversity of languages (as either source or target languages of the different case-studies), including Chinese, Czech, French, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish. \nThese contributions are organized into three main sections, labelled as: Theory, Specialized Translation, Literary Translation. The first section is devoted to theoretical reflections on the issue of translating figurative language, and it is opened by the inaugural speech Umberto Eco gave on the topic of seeing images in a text. The concepts of ekfrasis and metaphor are tackled, as well as the translatability of such visions. Metaphors are the main object of study of the four contributions in this section. Gerard Steen draws on the cognitive linguistic framework he has built up in his Metaphor Lab and adapts it, himself for the first time, to the aspect of interlingual translation. He wonders what is the problem (if any) in translating metaphors, through a few examples ranging from literary translation to interpreting. Zoltán Kövecses also adapts his long-lasting researches on conceptual metaphor to the topic of translation: resorting to some of the reflections he has carried out on the intercultural aspect of conceptual metaphors, he indulges on possible effects this may have on translation practices. Stefano Arduini adopts a translation-studies stance to draw an historical trajectory of the treatment of figurative language within translation studies (and before then). In the end, he advocates for a more courageous treatment of metaphors in translation. Mark Shuttleworth closes this section sketching a parallel between the two scientific domains at stake here, namely metaphor studies and translation studies, arguing for their beneficial interchange, which is what this volume and the conference has aimed at. \nSection 2 and 3 contain a series of applied studies on the translation of different kinds of figurative language and they are organized in terms of the (sub)genre involved. Section 2 is devoted to specialized translation, with two subsections on Economics and Politics and Science and Popularisation. \nChristina Schäffner – whose paper on the implications of a cognitive approach to metaphor translation has elicited much interest throughout this volume – deals with the translation of economical metaphors within the European discourse, namely within the English-German language pair. Economics is also the subject of Mirella Agorni’s paper, albeit from a more pedagogical perspective, since she offers a case-study of a group of MA students involved in the challenges of translating the ambiguities and irony of figurative language in specialized journalism, with a particular attention to terminology. Sabina Luciana Tcaciuc analyses the treatment of metaphors in a corpus of European Central Bank’s translated texts (English-Romanian), investigating two recurrent conceptual metaphors through the framework of corpus analysis. The section closes on a paper dealing with political discourse in an utterly different context: Paolo Magagnin carries us through the images employed by Chinese leader Hu-Jintao in his 2012 address to the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, and its English translation as it was relayed on the international press, identifying a general tendency to neutralize or undertranslate figurative language. Another contribution to the translation of political discourse is offered by Nicoletta Spinolo, who draws on an experiment she carried out with Masters’ students, dealing with the treatment of metaphors in interpreting political speeches. The constraints seen in other papers are enhanced, in this specific case, by the time-constraints and peculiarities of interpreting. \nThe following section, Science and Popularisation, is opened by Ana Pano Alaman’s paper on the early translations of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Italian and Spanish. She focuses on the treatment of personifications and analogies, arguably two salient features of Darwin’s rhetoric. Scientific translation, albeit of a more popular type, is also investigated in Marina Manfredi’s paper, which analyses the treatment of lexical and grammatical metaphors in the Italian version of the magazine National Geographic. She adopts the framework of systemic-functional grammar to analyse the translation of the paratextes of such articles. Hallidayan ‘grammatical metaphors’ are also the aim of Yvonne Lindqvist’s paper, which takes them as regulators of social distance in the Swedish translation of popular Anglophone kitchen books. \n The third section of the book is devoted to chapters dealing with the translation of figurative language in literary texts. Canadian literature is represented by Patricia Godbout’s paper, investigating metonymy and metaphors in the translation of contemporary novelists such as Anne Hébert and the Nobel-prize laureate Alice Munro. Fabio Regattin deals with the Italian translation of Boris Vian’s ‘langage-univers’, a language rich in creative revitalisations of idiomatic expressions and as such particularly challenging to translate. Two Italian translations of Vian’s novel L’écume des jours are investigated. Renata Kamenicka deals with two opposite tendencies (standardisation/ dynamisation) observed in a corpus of contemporary translated literature (Czech-English) as to the treatment of figurative language. Jane Johnson resorts to corpus stylistics to investigate the treatment of similes in the English translation of a selection of novels by the Nobel-prize laureate Grazia Deledda. Alessandro Niero deals with the figure of repetition in his own Italian translation of Zamjatin’s We (Mы), illustrating through several examples the salience of such features in the source-text and in its translation. Russian literature is also the topic of the joint effort of Gabriella Elina Imposti and Irina Marchesini, who focus their analysis on wordplay as a ‘manifestation of figurative poetry’. Palindromes and other instances of wordplay are analysed in the prose (and poetry) of 20th century-Russian au

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