Analysis of ‘Heart’ Metaphors in the Translation of To The Lighthouse: A Cognitive-Inspired Approach

Abstract

Metaphors as a matter of thought can differ across languages and cultures depending on life experience, cultural background and individual differences. Emotion-related metaphors are widely used specifically in literary texts for conveying certain effects. Translating emotion-related metaphors can be a hard task, as problems arise due to differences between two conceptual systems. Several researchers have highlighted the importance of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) for understanding and analyzing metaphors. This study aims to analyze emotion-related metaphors, particularly the ‘heart’ metaphors extracted from the novel To The Lighthouse and their translation into Arabic. In the analysis, the researchers identified the underlying conceptual metaphor of each metaphorical expression and looked at how it was expressed at the linguistic level. The conceptual metaphors of the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) were then categorized considering the Cognitive Translation Hypothesis (CTH). The findings indicate that ‘heart’ metaphors were used similarly at the conceptual level in both languages, but in some cases, they differed slightly at the linguistic level. This confirms the basic premise that some emotion-related concepts are universal and deeply rooted in our thought and cognition. The translator used the strategy of addition mostly to produce a plausible equivalent. Moreover, it was found that ‘heart’ occurred more frequently in the Arabic translation of the novel in which metaphorization was used to express emotions in the ST even if ‘heart’ was not used in the expression.