WikiLeaks Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy : A Translation Study of Metaphors and Metonomy in Two Newspaper Articles from the Guardian

Sammanfattning: Abstract The purpose of this essay was to examine what methods might be used in translation from English to Swedish of two informative newspaper articles about current events, which took place in 2010 and 2011, viz. the publishing of secret documents on the Internet by JulianAssange and WikiLeaks. The study is based on Lakoff and Johnson’s theories on metaphorical concepts, presented in their work Metaphors We Live By (1980/2003), and the focus of the translation study is on metaphors and metonomy. The texts contain a large number of metaphors. Almost 100 of those have been listed in an Appendix, attached to this paper, and a great many of these metaphors were analysed. The special metaphor types of metonomy and personification were studied separately, as well as together with the rest of the metaphors. The theoretical model used was Vinay and Darbelnet’s theories of direct and oblique translation, comprising the following seven strategies: literal translation, borrowing, calque, transposition, modulation, equivalence and adaptation. Other theorists, whose professional expertise and experience proved useful in this work, were Munday, Newmark and Ingo. Parallel texts, monolingual dictionaries and the Internet were also most valuable in the translation process. Choosing the appropriate and correct vocabulary and expression in the target language was not always an easy task, and certain words and passages translated were revised on several occasions. As for the translation strategies used, equivalence was the most interesting one, and transposition should perhaps have been used to a larger extent. Literal translation was probably used most of them all.