Metaphors for metaphor translation

Résumé En

This essay analyses the metaphors used by translation scholars to define metaphor translation. The topic has elicited a surge of interest in translation studies since the late 1970s, and here a corpus of some 15 essays is taken into account, covering a diverse range of approaches to the issue. The main narrative is that of metaphor as a problem in translation, which finds its way through most if not all of the essays considered here. While not being dissociated with the traditional narrative of a more general theory of translation, in this specific case the activity seems almost doomed to failure. This is also confirmed by a number of spatial metaphors drawing a borderline space for metaphor translation and locating metaphors at the “limits of translatability”. A final set of metaphors identified in our corpus resorts to the concepts of dimensions and forces, in order to allow a more encompassing view of the figure and its translation. Such models attempts at moving beyond the narrative of a troublesome, unsolvable activity, towards a non-simplistic, quantitative approach to the issue.