In Other Words: What’s Happened to Metaphors in the Translation of Political Texts

This empirical study takes a cognitive perspective and examines the translation of metaphors in speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping as collected in the first volume of the book The Governance of China published in 2014. The study draws upon Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1980) and Newmark’s categories of translation procedure for metaphors (1980). The researchers’ data analysis has shown that (1) four out of the eight existing translation procedures for metaphors are employed in translating Xi’s metaphors; and (2) while the use of one translation procedure reflects similar cognitive mapping conditions between the source and the target culture, the use of the other procedures does not always correlate with the similarities or differences in cognitive mappings between the two cultures in question. The research raises new inquiries regarding metaphor translation and the researchers accordingly discuss the implications of their findings for metaphor translation pedagogy and future translation studies