Reconceptualization of ‘Light’ as UP-Orientational Metaphor in War Narratives: A Trilingual Corpus-based Study

This paper aims at presenting a component part of the doctoral research into the translation of conceptual metaphors. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodological framework which intertwines methods pertaining to Corpus Linguistics, Translation Studies, Cognitive Sciences and ICT, this study is focused on the analysis of (i) the conceptualization of ‘Light’ as UP-orientational metaphor in literary war narratives and (ii) the reconceptualization of such metaphor within interlinguistic and intercultural transfer via translation. The analysis employs a trilingual parallel corpus comprising one English language source sub-corpus and two translational target language sub-corpora, one in Romanian and another in Spanish. The results are indicative of frequent inequivalence in translation which affects the reception of the target texts.