Translating lexical and grammatical metaphor in popular science magazines: The case of National Geographic (Italia)

This paper aims at exploring the translation of metaphor, both ‘lexical’ and ‘grammatical’ (Halliday 1985/1994), in popular science texts, dealing with the language pair English-Italian. In particular, it will focus on the paratext, or rather peritext, made up of headlines and their most typical subdivisions, i.e., subheads, the so-called ‘upper-decks’, ‘straplines’ and ‘nut-graphs’, where metaphor plays a major role. The analysis is based upon a corpus of articles from the popular science magazine, National Geographic, in its American print version and in its corresponding Italian one. The theoretical background of the study is mainly rooted in linguistics and translation studies, but it also draws on journalism. The paper will start with a cursory illustration of the domain of popular science discourse, followed by a presentation of the goals of this study. It will then move on to briefly explain the notion of ‘grammatical metaphor’ as introduced by systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1985/1994) and to show a taxonomy of functions of titles and headings as presented by Nord (1995, 2012) within the framework of translation studies. The second part of the paper will be more practical and will focus on the discussion of a selection of illustrative examples from the corpus under scrutiny. It will conclude with a brief overview of results and some future prospects for further investigation. The final aim of the paper, despite the narrow perspective of the case study, is to establish whether the translation of headlines, and of the interconnected peritextual elements, generally results in a process of ‘re-metaphorisation’ or if a tendency towards ‘de-metaphorisation’ prevails.