Cross-cultural Variation in Idiomatic Expression: Insights from Cognitive Metaphor Theory and Implications for Translation Studies

This paper addresses the applied aspect of Cognitive Linguistics and explores the contribution that a knowledge of Conceptual Metaphor Theory can make to cross-linguistic or contrastive analysis and eventually also to translation practice. Through a contrastive observation of two languages, English and Italian, the study explores the problems involved in the cross-language rendering of figurative expressions and concomitantly focuses on the similarities/differences of their metaphorical motivation. It then draws practical conclusions for translation strategies. Following the insights given in Hiraga (1994), Kovecses (2003) and Charteris-Black (2001) concerning cross-cultural similarities and differences in conceptual metaphors, and following the suggestions given in Barcelona (1997) regarding methodological procedures for the identification of conceptual metaphors, the study offers guidelines thought to be useful to applied linguists when identifying figurative equivalences for contrastive analysis. It also considers, however, the constraints imposed on translation practice both by cross-cultural variation in metaphorical conceptualization and by language-specific morphosyntactic structure, text-typology and discourse strategy conventions.