Translating The Metaphors We Live By

Abstract

Lakoff and Johnson's groundbreaking Metaphors We Live By (1980) has been widely translated. Drawing on a corpus of three translations into Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish), the study considers the cross-cultural productivity of conceptual metaphors, as well as the intercultural negotiations at play in the translation process. While most conceptual metaphors seem to cut across these closely-related cultures, their linguistic realizations still present a significant degree of variation.

Keywords:

• conceptual metaphor
• translation
• cross-cultural
• Lakoff
• George
• Johnson
• Mark

Notes

1 As has become customary in the tradition of Lakoff and Johnson's book, conceptual metaphors are indicated in small capitals.

2 FR is cited in the References under Lakoff and Johnson (FR).

3 Unless otherwise stated, translations are mine. SP is cited in the References under Lakoff and Johnson (SP).

4 Neither the Italian 2007 edition, nor the Spanish 2007 edition, includes the authors' afterword which appeared in the 2003 revised edition of Metaphors We Live By. IT is cited in the References under Lakoff and Johnson (IT).

5 While this is the most common translation strategy, it is not the only one possible. For example, in the Russian edition (Lakoff and Johnson, 2004), the English examples are kept alongside their Russian translation.

6 Two seminars, held at the University of Bologna and the University of Haute-Alsace, allowed me to test these translations with native speakers of the four languages involved, to whom I am indebted for a native assessment of the translations.

7 Only FR manages to escape from this structure. Incidentally, one may note how a similarly ‘literal’ solution was in fact adopted in Russian: Memaфopр, кomopрмu мржuеeм (‘Metaphors we live by’) (Lakoff and Johnson, 2004), while in German a transformation has been carried out, opting for a ‘strong’ interpretation of the source title: Leben in Metaphern (‘Living in metaphors’) (Lakoff and Johnson, 2007).

8 While being conventional in French, this latter expression, ‘mettre sur le papier’ (put down on paper), does not seem to rely as strongly as the others on the conduit metaphor.

9 These four forms are quoted for example in Augusto Arthaber's comparative dictionary of proverbs in seven languages (1989: 674–75). In Spanish, the expression ‘El tiempo es oro’ is also possible and conventional.

10 It should be noted though, that the metaphor goes much further back, at least to Diogenes Laërtius, who, speaking of Theophrastus in c.230 ce, states the following: ‘And a very favourite expression of his was, that time was the most valuable thing that a man could spend’ (Diogenes Laërtius, 1853 Book 5, chapter 10, p. 196).

11 ‘Time is a moving object makes up only 2.73% of the temporal instances in the American corpus [Brown Corpus]. For the British corpus [Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus] the figure is 4.65%’ (Boers 1996: 215).

12 ‘Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience with industrial capitalism, was the agent which converted men to new valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to improve each shining hour; and which saturated men's minds with the equation, time is money’ (Thompson, 1967: 128).

13 INVESTIRE. 6 v. tr.CO TS psic., concentrare energia, carica affettiva e psichica su una persona, su un oggetto, su un'immagine reale o immaginaria. (TO INVEST. To concentrate energy, affective and psychic charge on a person, on an object, on an image, be it real or imaginary.) Dizionario De-Mauro Paravia Online Edition. 30 Nov. 2008 <http://old.demauroparavia.it/59461>

14 Lakoff and Johnson (2003: 14, 24) point out that cultural factors do come into play even in orientational metaphors: ‘Though the polar oppositions up-down, in-out, etc., are physical in nature, the orientational metaphors based on them can vary from culture to culture … . In general the major orientations up-down, in-out, central-peripheral, active-passive, etc., seem to cut across all cultures, but which concepts are oriented which way and which orientations are most important vary from culture to culture’.