Cognitive Linguistics and Translation Studies: Translating Conceptual Metaphors in Popular Science Articles

This paper aims at exploring the fruitful interface between Cognitive Linguistics and Translation Studies in the field of Metaphor in Translation. After offering an overview of the relationship between the two disciplines as for metaphor translation, I illustrate the main Cognitive Linguistics issues that may be relevant to the study of coding and recoding conceptual metaphors from a source language-culture to a target language-culture. I then investigate such an interlingual transfer in the domain of popular science discourse, through a small selection of illustrative examples taken from authentic Italian target texts and English source texts. I attempt to demonstrate how prescriptivism can be avoided and the traditional concept of translation ‘equivalence’ can be reconsidered. The centrality of the translator as a decision-making agent in the translation process is reassessed while taking a cognitive approach to an analysis of translation of metaphorical expressions.