Translation of Metaphors in Saleh Hosseini’s and Khojasteh Keyhan’s Persian Translations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: A Comparative Study Based on Newmark’s and Lakoff and Johnson’s Classifications of Metaphors

The present study was devoted to compare the use of most frequent kinds of metaphors in Woolf’s (1994) To the Lighthouse and two Persian translations of this novel by Hosseini (2008) and Keyhan (2007) based on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) and Newmark’s (1988) classifications of metaphors. The study also aimed to find out how much the source text and the two translations are similar in using metaphors. Following the model Emami (1993) used in the analysis of The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isphahan, 45 pages of To the Lighthouse were chosen from the first, middle, and final sections of the novel for the metaphorical analyses. The results of the study revealed that ontological metaphors and standard metaphors were used more frequently than the other kinds of metaphors in the source text and the two translations. The results of chi-square tests showed that in terms of Lakoff and Johnson’s classification, there were no statistically significant differences between either of the two translations and the source text and no statistically significant differences between the two translations. On the other hand, regarding Newmark’s classification, though there were no statistically significant differences between the two translations, there were statistically significant differences between either of the two translations and the source text. Moreover, the two classifications of metaphors were put together to see how much correspondence exists between them. The results indicated that ontological, orientational, and structural metaphors are highly correspondent to standard metaphors