Metaphorical events in translation: Does language type matter?

Speakers across different languages structure a similar set of target domains (e.g., emotions, time, ideas) as spatial motion, relying on the same metaphorical mappings (abstract concept as moving entity; abstract concept as location). These crosslinguistic similarities co-occur with crosslinguistic differences in the lexicalization of the source domain, with some languages encoding manner more frequently than others . But do these patterns of similarities and differences extend to translations of written texts? In this study, we analyzed metaphorical motion expressions from novels written in typologically distinct (German vs. Spanish) vs. typologically similar languages (German vs. Polish) and their translations into a language from the opposite (German vs. Spanish) or the same typological group (German vs. Polish). We observed strong crosslinguistic similarities in target domains and metaphorical mappings and systematic crosslinguistic differences in the lexicalization of the source domain, with translations largely adhering to the patterns of the target language. Our findings thus suggest that translations of metaphorical motion events to a target language—be it of a similar or a different typological group—follow the same patterns in the target and source language in structure (mappings) but adhere to the patterns of the target language in the lexicalization of the metaphorical event.