Synaesthetic metaphor and its reproduction in Russian-to-English translation: a frame-based study
The paper offers speculations and inferences about linguistic synaesthesia and the synaesthetic metaphor. Being a predominant form of linguistic synaesthesia, synaesthetic metaphors make up a specific class of metaphors where the both domains pertain to perception. Despite the attempts to develop concepts explaining translation patterns for encoding linguistic synaesthesia in target languages, there are still no well-designed classifications of translation strategies. Thus, the study aimed to fill the gap and elicit cognitive patterns and strategies used by English-speaking translators when confronted with Russian synaesthetic metaphors. The paper also focuses on the problem of detecting universals and shifts in understanding inter-modal relations across languages and across individual translators. The novelty of the study consists in the development of the original typology of translation patterns and strategies used for synaesthetic metaphors. The combination of several methods developed by different theories, i.e. Frame Semantics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Metaphor Translation Studies, was first applied for the study of the synaesthetic metaphor. Such an approach allowed to elicit eight major translation strategies ranging from full or partial reproduction of the intended synaesthesia to a full loss of any synaesthetic effect when the original synaesthetic metaphors were translated into hypallages, comparisons and non-metaphors. Synaesthetic shifts or even omissions of synaesthesia in translation can be accounted for by conceptual-cultural-verbal mismatches between the source and the target languages. However, synaesthesia often gets lost solely due to individual translation solutions, which is easily revealed when different translations of the same metaphor are compared.
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Simonenko, M. A. and Kazaryan, S. Y. (2023). Synaesthetic metaphor and its reproduction in Russian-to-English translation: a frame-based study, Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 9 (3), 26-40. DOI: 10.18413/2313-8912-2023-9-3-0-2
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