Strategies of conveying metaphors in political discourse: analysis of the Turkish translations of George Orwell's “Animal Farm”

Submitted: 18 April 2020 Accepted: 09 May 2020 Translating metaphor and metaphoric expressions is one of the disputable problems in translation studies due to the conceptual discrepancies which exist between the source culture and the target readership, moreover, if the metaphor plays a crucial role in creating an appeal to the reader as in the political text. In this respect, it is under the discussion of how to deal with a metaphor when translating political discourse, and what are the dominating strategies and traditions of translating metaphoric units in Turkish translations. Caused by the theoretical and practical urgency of the problem, this paper is aimed to analyze strategies of conveying metaphors from English to Turkish based on the novel “Animal Farm” by George Orwell and its Turkish translations by Sedat Demir and Celal Üster. To achieve the aims of the research the efforts were undertaken to compare the original text with its two different translations. For the precise analysis, Old Major’s speech was thoroughly scrutinized on the point of the metaphoric expressions in the text and their correspondences in the Turkish translations. The methods applied in the research include the discourse analysis aimed to re-veal metaphors in the source text, comparative analysis to identify language items used in the translations to convey the metaphors, and methods of the structural analysis for contrasting lexical constructions in the source text and its translations, analysis of the translation shifts. The conclusions outline strategies applied for translating metaphoric expressions from English into Turkish with the identifications of the shifts which occur in the texts of translation.