Translating science for young people through metaphor

ABSTRACT

In this article, we show what insights can be gained by considering the relationship between expert and non-expert texts about scientific topics through the lens of ‘translation’. We focus specifically on the metaphors used to discuss climate change in a range of educational materials and in interviews with secondary school students in the UK. We show the complex web of relationships among the people and genres that may influence students’ understandings of climate change, and focus on the role of teachers in particular as ‘translators’ of scientific knowledge. We then report on several comparisons of metaphor use among texts and genres that stand in source–target relationships within this web of intralingual translations, and also consider the metaphors used by students themselves to express their understanding of climate change. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the differences we have observed, and suggest that a translation perspective can usefully highlight the challenges and potential pitfalls involved in mediating scientific knowledge for the benefit of non-experts such as school-age students.

KEYWORDS:

• Science
• genre
• metaphor
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The National Curriculum states in considerable detail the topics that must be covered in government schools. All subjects are compulsory until students are in their early teens.

2. In England, the more academically able of 16–18 year olds take quite specialised courses leading to ‘A Levels’.

3. The New Scientist is a popular weekly magazine covering topics of current scientific interest, aimed at an educated but not specialist readership.

Additional information

Funding

This is part of a larger study funded by AHRC [grant number AH/M003809/1].

Notes on contributors

Alice Deignan

Alice Deignan is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Leeds, UK. She works with corpora to investigate lexical meaning, especially focussing on metaphor and metonymy. She is author of Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics (2005, John Benjamins) and co-author of Figurative Language, Genre and Register (2013, CUP with Jeannette Littlemore and Elena Semino).

Elena Semino

Elena Semino is Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. She holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Fuzhou in China. She specializes in health communication, medical humanities, corpus linguistics, stylistics, narratology and metaphor theory and analysis. She has (co-)authored over 90 academic publications, including: Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-based Study (Routledge, 2018).