Building a Balanced Organizational Culture – Imagery in Corporate Storytelling : Metaphors and Translation

This study investigates the use of metaphors in corporate storytelling and the strategies that may be applied when translating these from English to Swedish. The conceptual metaphor theory was used as a starting point for the investigation of structural metaphors in particular. The results reveal that the most common translation strategy was keeping the same conceptual metaphor in the target text. The second most common strategy was changing into a different metaphor. Moreover, metaphors were often omitted which results in a translation with less evocative imagery. The metaphorical concepts organism and building were found to be the most frequent. The weave metaphor was frequent in storytelling, and the organism, building, and machine metaphors were common in business contexts, similar to what earlier studies have found. Some conceptual metaphors were less frequent in the translation due to cultural differences, although both similarities and differences were encountered when analyzing the metaphorical expressions in detail. The study also reveals that an awareness of organizational metaphors is fundamental in order to render an inspirational and persuasive text in this genre as accurately as possible, while at the same time being faithful to the style and imagery in the original