TRANSLATION OF CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR THROUGH THE ANALYSIS OF EXAMPLES EXTRACTED FROM THE NOVEL ˮSILKˮ WRITTEN BY ALESSANDRO BARRICO

Abstract

Diverse research in the field of cognitive linguistics at the end of the twentieth century led to a completely new perception of metaphor. Once interpreted only as stylistic figure, the metaphor becomes a mechanism for understanding the way we think and comprehend the world around us. As a result of the changes in its understanding, a different observation of the translation process occurs, and in this paper, we will focus on the transfer of the conceptual metaphor from the source language to the target language. The theoretical framework will refer to the interpretation of metaphor according to the cognitive-linguistic approach where we will point out as well the influence that the functioning of our cognitive system has on the appearance of metaphor in literature. We will also analyze the competencies that the translator should have to transfer the conceptual metaphor from the original to the target text in the most adequate way. In order to determine how this translation process can be carried out, this paper will include the practical analysis of the conceptual metaphor present in the novel Silk written by Alessandro Barrico and its transfer from Italian to Serbian. Examples of metaphorical expressions will be excerpted from the entire novel, while their translation analysis will be based on Schmidt's theory of conceptual metaphor transfer, according to which there are several possibilities: translating a metaphorical expression by using the same conceptual metaphor in both languages, translating a metaphorical expression with a different conceptual metaphor in the target language, translating a metaphorical expression with a non-metaphorical expression of similar meaning and deleting the metaphor, i.e. omitting it in the target language. To show more clearly how the analyzed terms are conceptualized in the Italian language, we will divide the selected metaphorical expressions into two groups according to the original domains on which these metaphors are based on - living beings as the original domain and inanimate nature and objects as the original domain.