Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Translation No.4 May, 2015 Pp.68- 87
Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence across Languages and Cultures
Karnedi
English Language and Literature Department
Faculty of Social and Political Sciences
Universitas Terbuka, Indonesia
Abstract:
The use of metaphors in both economics and business texts has been debated among economists. However, little attention has been paid to the phenomenon of metaphorical coherence in branches of economics texts in which a set of different categories and types of conceptual metaphor are used for different communicative purposes. As for the research methodology, this paper investigates this phenomenon by adopting a qualitative method in terms of textual analysis, the cognitive and corpus-based approaches, as well as the comparative model of translation. The results show that 19 types of metaphor were used in the source text subcorpus; some of which tend to co-occur with a set of other types of metaphor. A critical analysis of the metaphorical coherence, which enhances and strengthens meaning in the source text (as opposed to translation in the target language), is followed by a detailed discussion of a translation in Indonesian as the target language. In terms of translation procedures, most of the SL metaphors were rendered as metaphors into Indonesian with similar source domain whereas other types of metaphor were replaced with a standard source domain in Indonesian. This paper concludes with the view that metaphorical coherence is not only source-language-and-culture-orientated but also target-language-and-culture-orientated as it comes laden with translation problems.
Keywords: cognitive approach, corpus-based approach, language and culture, metaphorical coherence, translation