A corpus-based study of conceptual metaphor in Arabic translations of American self-help books on marriage relationships

Alharbi, Ahmed Nafea ORCID: 0009-0007-2056-9877 (2023). A corpus-based study of conceptual metaphor in Arabic translations of American self-help books on marriage relationships. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Preview

Alharbi2023PhD.pdf
Text - Accepted Version
Available under License All rights reserved.
Download (3MB) | Preview

Abstract

This thesis explores the translational treatment of conceptual metaphors in a parallel corpus of English self-help texts on marriage relationships and their Arabic translations. The focus here on conceptual metaphors is primarily motivated by the need for a definitive account of the challenges posed by such metaphors in translation, the sorts of procedures used to handle them, and the actual factors contributing to the ease or difficulty of their translation. These issues have not been adequately addressed in previous analyses, which concentrated largely on literary and political texts. Little information was therefore available on the translation of conceptual metaphors in other text types. There was also a lack of literature on how to find, classify, and analyse different kinds of conceptual metaphors within the context of a parallel corpus. This thesis represents an attempt to rectify these inadequacies. It deals with conceptual metaphors that characterise the newly emerging discourse of self-help books on marriage relationships, and how these characteristic metaphors are handled by their translators into Arabic. In addition, it introduces a detailed and replicable methodology for researching the translation of conceptual metaphors from a descriptive perspective. The value of the proposed methodology lies in its ease of application as well as its potential to generate accurate and reliable results. The main findings show that most of the conceptual metaphors that occur in this text type are easy to translate literally without necessarily incurring any loss of the intended meaning or purpose. This is attributable to a range of reasons, which can be summed up in four points: (a) their high level of universality, (b) their lack of novelty, (c) the availability of translational equivalents in the target language, and (d) the receptivity of the target readership to the source-language metaphorical imagery. These are the principal determinants that influence the extent to which an English conceptual metaphor is translatable into Arabic.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):