Wine-tasting metaphors and their translation: A cognitive approach

Abstract

In winespeak, metaphors are a real challenge for the translator. Indeed, many metaphoric expressions cannot be found in dictionaries and their true meaning is not defined. The only basis for their translation seems to be the conceptual basis they are built upon. Indeed, wine tasting metaphors are linguistic realisations of conceptual metaphors, with mappings from well-known domains used to understand and communicate the intangible experience of taste. Various conceptual metaphors appear in the same tasting note, creating a complex blend, or conceptual integration pattern. So the translation procedures generally put forward in translation studies, based on the linguistic conception of metaphor, appear inappropriate. The cognitive translation hypothesis offers a good basis to compare source and target text wine-tasting metaphors.