Remapping meaning : exploring the products and processes of translating conceptual metaphor

Translation Studies has devoted considerable attention to the translation of metaphor. While many earlier contributions addressed the translatability of lexical metaphors and heuristically classified procedures for transferring them, later studies use empirical data from bilingual corpora of texts to explore the procedures and parameters of lexical metaphor translation. The growing interest in cognitive approaches to translation over the last three decades has also seen translation scholars applying conceptual metaphor theory to product-oriented studies of metaphor translation. Leading scholars investigating conceptual metaphor include Schäffner and Shuttleworth (2013), who sketch out the possibilities of combining these more traditional product-oriented approaches with techniques used to access the process of translation. Although process-oriented methods have been deployed to investigate grammatical, lexical and conceptual metaphor in terms of source-text reception, difficulty and cognitive effort or load, specific process-oriented studies are still relatively rare on how translators actually transfer meanings encapsulated in conceptual metaphor. This paper attempts to describe some salient features of the process of transferring those meanings. Drawing on product and process data, it presents the analysis and results of laboratory translation processes collected from student and professional translators. Triangulated data from screen recordings with eye-tracking visualisations, retrospective verbal commentaries and target-text products reveal how translators at various levels of experience, and working in different language pairs, appear to map and remap conceptual metaphorical meanings as they work. The paper ends by considering the implications of the combined product- and process-oriented approach adopted in this exploratory study