Metaphor-based Internet terms in English and in French.

The objectives of this thesis are to analyze (1) how English metaphor-based terms in the Internet domain are formed, and (2) how such terms are being rendered into French. By metaphor-based term (MBT), we mean a term that has derived from a metaphor. MBTs are becoming increasingly frequent and important in computer-related domains. However, they have been rather neglected in the metaphor literature in general, and in the translation literature specifically. The thesis is an attempt to begin filling this gap. Our research involved analyzing MBTs found in English and French corpora pertaining to the Internet, an exceptionally rich source of MBTs. We began by reviewing the concept of metaphor and the various ways terms are created. Drawing partly on these observations, we proposed a general classification of English MBTs in the Internet domain. Next, we investigated the available literature on the translation of metaphor, and applied some of the deriving insights to an analysis of the MBTs in our French corpus. This analysis resulted in a categorization of the various strategies used for rendering English MBTs into French. Finally, we attempted to explain why certain English MBTs may be more easily rendered into French than others