Soluciones existentes

excerpt from Cicero’s Sullius, 76 (quoted in Gildenhard 2011: 102):

Perspicite etiam atque etiam, iudices—nihil enim est quod in hac causa dici possit vehementius—penitus introspicite Catilinae Autroni Cethegi Lentuli ceterorumque mentes:

quas vos in his libidines, quae flagitia, quas turpitudines, quantas audacias, quam incredibiles furores, quas notas facinorum, quae indicia parricidiorum, quantos acervos scelerum reperietis! Ex magnis et diuturnis at iam desperatis rei publicae morbis ista repente vis erupit, ut ea collecta et eiecta convalescere aliquando et sanari civitas posset; neque enim est quisquam qui arbitretur illis inclusis in re publica pestibus diutius haec stare potuisse.

The English translation may be helpful:

Look discerningly over and again, judges—for there is nothing in this trial, which one could say with greater emphasis – look deeply into the minds of Cataline, Autronius, Cethegus, Lentulus, and all the rest: what desires, what enormities, what indecencies, how much impudence, what unbelievable madness, what marks of misdeeds, what indications of murder, how large the heaps of crimes you will find within them! Out of severe, chronic, and already incurable maladies of the state that violent force suddenly burst forth, so that our civic community, once the violent force had been gathered together and ejected, was finally able to regain its strength and health. For no one, surely, believes that our commonwealth could have survived any further while these agents of disease were enclosed inside.

These two text excerpts may serve as useful materials for a brief introduction to the most important ideas about metaphor in contemporary metaphor research in language and discourse (Steen 2011).

Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor in language and thought became famous because of its wealth of linguistic examples suggesting that we do not only talk about, e.g., understanding as seeing (look, find), the state as a person or a body (incurable maladies, regain its strength and health), and emotions as hot fluids in containers (burst forth, gathered together and ejected), but that we also think about them in these ways. This holds across all languages and

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is crucial for translation: both Latin and English use ‘seeing’ words to talk about understanding: perspicite, introspicite and reperietis as well as look and find.

Concomitant preposition in, adverb penitus and morpheme intro- also all have exact equivalents in English: in, deeply, and into. Roughly the same parallelism holds for the other metaphors in the text as well.

The cognitive-linguistic approach holds that metaphor in language is a reflection of metaphor in thought: we need metaphor in thought to project conceptual structures from relatively more concrete, simple and better known domains, like seeing, bodies/people, and fluids in containers, to conceptualise more abstract, complex and less known domains, like understanding, states, and emotions. There are important theoretical questions about the precise application of this proposal to ‘thought’ (Steen 2007, 2011; Gibbs 2011), some theories suggesting that metaphor requires mandatory online mapping in people’s individual minds, others seeing metaphor mainly as a matter of micro-social or even macro-social and cultural processes of

‘thought’ in discourse. For our present purposes, I posit that this macro-social process of metaphorical mapping is clearly observable across many discourse events, happens across all cultures and is hence found in all languages, which, as a result, display massive amounts of metaphorically motivated polysemy in their lexico-grammar in fairly comparable ways. Moreover, the history of language contact can add to this inter-language parallelism, an observation which forcefully applies to the relation between Latin and English.

Extensive linguistic analysis (for a comprehensive overview, see Kövecses 2010) has suggested that there may be conceptual metaphors that are conventionalised systematic mappings between source and target domains in our knowledge systems, facilitating the conceptualisation of important categories and domains by means of metaphorical projection. The excerpt from Cicero above displays no fewer than four of the conceptual metaphors that have become familiar to many linguists:

UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING, MORE IS UP, THE STATE IS A PERSON/BODY, and (BAD)

EMOTIONS ARE HOT FLUIDS IN A CONTAINER. What is important is that their translations into English look just as natural, illustrating the idea that these conceptual metaphors may be fairly stable and valid across time and cultures, at least among closely related cultures. This is a proposal that has had an effect on translation theory as well (e.g., Lakoff 1987; Mandelblit 1995; Al Hasnawi 2007): translation of metaphor varies according to whether two languages display similar mapping conditions or different mapping conditions for that particular metaphorical projection.

The study of these conceptual metaphors, conceptual systems and mapping conditions is fraught with theoretical and methodological difficulties (Steen 2007), a discussion of which would take us too far afield in the context of the present argument. What is more important is that it always requires the identification of metaphors in STs for translation, and STs and TTs for translation studies. Two questions hence arise: (a) which criteria need to be applied to collect all metaphors from a text, and (b) which criteria can be applied to test whether each of these metaphors can be connected to some presumably underlying conceptual metaphor?

The past decade has seen the development of the first reliable variant of a metaphor identification procedure, called MIP (Pragglejaz Group 2007). The method is not dependent on the assumption of conceptual metaphors and does not necessarily aim at identifying them. It offers an operational definition of linguistic metaphor that

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is intended to be completely compatible, however, with the cognitive-linguistic definition of metaphor as indirect meaning based on cross-domain mapping. MIP has been statistically tested for reliability and the output of the procedure can be easily connected to conceptual metaphor research.

MIP comprises the following steps:

1. Read the entire text to understand the general context.

2. Decide about lexical units.

3a. Establish the contextual meaning of the examined lexical unit, i.e. its application in the situation evoked by the text, taking into account the words surrounding the examined lexical unit.

3b. Determine the basic meaning of the word on the basis of the dictionary. The basic meaning is usually the most concrete, human oriented, specific (as opposed to vague) and historically older meaning.

3c. Decide whether the basic meaning of the word is sufficiently distinct from the contextual meaning.

3d. Decide whether the contextual meaning of the word can be related to the more basic meaning by some form of similarity.

4. If the answers to 3c and 3d are positive, the lexical unit should be marked as metaphorical.

When we apply this procedure to the above examples, it is clear that all of them are bona fide metaphorical uses. To illustrate, let us consider esercito from our first excerpt:

Step 3a Contextual meaning

In this context, the noun esercito indicates a host of people Step 3b Basic meaning

The basic meaning of the noun esercito is ‘a military army’

Step 3c Contextual meaning vs. basic meaning

The two senses are distinct: the contextual sense of esercito in this sentence differs from the basic sense of the noun. The dictionary lists these two senses as two separate descriptions.

Step 3d Contextual meaning vs. basic meaning

The two senses are related by similarity: a host of people is like a military army.

Step 4 Metaphorically used or not?

Yes, the contextual sense of esercito is distinct from the basic sense of this noun but they are related by similarity.

MIP has since been refined and developed by Steen et al. (2010), leading to a 16-page manual that can cover all manifestations of metaphor in discourse, including simile, explicit comparison, analogy, and so on. This is important, also for translation, because linguistic manifestations of metaphor are not restricted to plain metaphor when metaphor is theoretically defined as a conceptual cross-domain mapping, as has widely happened since the launch of the cognitive-linguistic approach.

Metaphor identification is crucial for assessing the quality of metaphor research, also for translation: if researchers cannot agree on what counts as an instance of a particular phenomenon by independent observations, then their findings are not much more than personal constructions and interpretations. Yet reliable metaphor identification is not ‘just’ an important methodological issue, but also involves the heart of the matter of the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor: its validity.

Some psychologists have denied that many of the linguistic illustrations of conceptual metaphor, including many of the ones adduced above, are metaphorical.

They argue that their polysemy may be motivated by metaphor but does not require resolution by on line metaphorical mapping. Instead, their polysemy may presumably be handled in language processing by general lexical disambiguation processes,

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therefore not involving any online cross-domain mapping. Let me give a concrete illustration.

When a word like esercito in the above example is accessed by the reader, both its metaphorical (‘host’) and non-metaphorical (‘military army’) sense are automatically activated in the first moments of lexical access. Then, during lexical integration, the metaphorical sense may simply be retained and used in the context of the rest of the sentence (cf. Giora 2008). It follows that there would be no need for a mapping across two conceptual domains from the allegedly privileged non-metaphorical sense to the metaphorical one to establish the metaphorical meaning of esercito: it is already available in the mental lexicon of the language user. This is presumably even more so for those words where the metaphorical sense is more salient than the nonmetaphorical one (Giora 2008). A case from our examples might be the English word malady from the translated Cicero excerpt, where the non-metaphorical

‘illness’ sense represents an old use of malady while the metaphorical contextual sense of ‘a serious problem in society’ would be the most salient, familiar and frequent sense. As a result, some psychologists argue, words like esercito and malady do not function metaphorically.

This conclusion elicits an essential question for translation: if many metaphors do not function metaphorically, why would it be important to translate them as metaphors? If metaphors are not always recognised as metaphors by readers, that is, if metaphors do not always cause readers to set up cross-domain mappings in their minds, then not every metaphor in a ST requires a metaphor in a TT. In other words, some metaphors may be more metaphorical than others. Which metaphors might these be? The next section will attempt to give an answer to this question.