Metaphor Rendition in Sports Journalism: A Study of the 2009 Yankee vs. Red Sox Games Reportage

[[abstract]]Metaphor is a tool so ordinary that we use it unconsciously and automatically, with so little effort that we hardly notice it. It is omnipresent: metaphor suffuses our thoughts, no matter what we are thinking about, and accessible to everyone as an integral part of ordinary everyday language. Far from being merely a matter of words, metaphor is a matter of thought – all kinds of thought: thought about emotion, about society, about human character, and about the nature of life and death. It is also indispensable to sports journalism, baseball journalism – the heart of this particular thesis. Major League Baseball has swept Taiwan off its feet since former Yankees ace pitcher – Taiwan-born Chien-ming Wang - became the centerpiece of the country’s sports columns in 2005; MLB games thus took up permanent residence in Taiwan’s baseball journalism in both print and electronic media. Using Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (2003) and its metaphor categorization approach as a foundation, this thesis aims at examining metaphor application in English reporting, and translation/addition/deletion strategies for addressing these English metaphors in Chinese-language print media. It is discovered in this study that the nature of metaphor, be it ontological, structural or orientational, plays little effect on rendition approach in Chinese sports coverage. In addition to offering a fresh perspective on viewing metaphors, recommendations are made to encourage creative elaboration of metaphorical elements in Chinese baseball journalism for future translation/adaptation strategies.