Chapter Five
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Consequently, they are common devices widely used in everyday
linguistic communication. By using metaphors, especially in professional
contexts, authors can ease their reader’s inferential responses and
therefore, get their messages decoded properly and fully understood. In my
particular case here, of financial metaphors and their translation, they have
a clear pragmatic and communicative purpose.
The inferential and social brain organization is thought to respond to a
modular and domain-specific model (Escandell-Vidal 2004) where each
system is activated by a specific information module – in our particular
case, by financial metaphors. Although the human inferential system
seems to be constructed around universal principles (Mateo & Yus 2009),
it has also a specific socio-cultural side, where each language (i.e. culture)
has devised its own ways of conceptualizing and naming things,
procedures, etc. These can be fine-tuned in intracultural exchanges in a
relatively easy way where participants likely share a cognitive and cultural
knowledge of these metaphorical financial terms. However, this cognitive
pairing is not guaranteed in intercultural contexts where source language
metaphorical meanings may not always match the linguistic, pragmatic or
professional expectations of target language users.
Consequently, these cognitive and cultural gaps should be addressed in
the translation process in general, and in the translation of (financial)
metaphors in particular.^4 This will, of course, involve the activation of a
series of cognitive, linguistic and cultural mechanisms aimed at
transferring, as closely as possible, the linguistic (terminological) and
communicative processes that were established between the source
language author and his/her target language readers (Shreve et al 2010).
To achieve this purpose, it is necessary that, in a first stage, translators
should manage to replicate in their work – and, consequently, in their
students of economics. He considers these texts as not fully specialized ones which
have been written for semi-experts and the general public while the students of
economics are supposed to be expert users. Accordingly, both textual types used
metaphorical expressions of a different nature and purpose.
(^4) However, the translation of metaphors has prompted different views as to their
interpretation. Nida (1964), for example, advocates the translation of metaphors
into non-metaphors while Kloepfer (1967) suggests word-by-word translation
strategies. Others, like Mason (1982) focused (1982), focus on the problem of the
cultural differences among languages, so their translation has to be undertaken in
isolation. Toury (1995), on his part, thinks metaphors are special cases that need
specific translation approaches; while Snell-Hornby (1995) promotes a metaphor
translation approach in relation to its specific use in specific texts. Finally,
Neumann (2001) claims that metaphors may reduplicate in different languages and
cultures so, in many cases, they can be translated regardless of the language.