The Heart of Language : Translating Metaphors in an Informative text

Sammanfattning: This paper is an analysis of the translation of metaphors in an English informative text and its Swedish translation. The English source text is entitled The Madonna of Stalingrad: Mastering the (Christmas) Past and West German National Identity after World War Two,and the Swedish target text is entitled Madonnan från Stalingrad: att behärska det (nazistiska) förflutna och västtysk identitet efter andra världskriget.The aim of this essay is to investigate how metaphors in an English informative text can be translated to Swedish. The analysis is based on translation strategies suggested by Vinay and Darbelnet (1995), and Newmark (1988). The understanding of metaphors is based on theories by a number of scholars, such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and Knowles and Moon (2006). In this paper, metaphors are divided into two groups, referred to as “literal metaphors” and “aesthetic metaphors”. The point is to convey that metaphors are not always “poetic” but actually very common in everyday language; we usually do not reflect upon the fact that we use metaphors all the time. The result of the analysis shows that English and Swedish metaphors are often based on the same images, which indicates that English and Swedish Language cultures are similar. The analysis also shows that even though literal translation of English metaphors often is possible, in many cases transposition or especially modulation is required to make the metaphor idiomatic in Swedish. In most cases, the need for another solution than literaltranslation seems to be linked to context.