Metaphorization in the translation of political texts

Abstract The translation strategy known as “metaphorization” involves adding a metaphor to the target text when the source text contains either a non-metaphorical expression or nothing at all. This strategy has been identified by Toury (1995, p. 81) in the two abovementioned categories as “non-metaphor into metaphor” and “0 into metaphor”, alongside other typical strategies such as retaining the original metaphor. While there has been research on metaphor translation strategies, the phenomenon of metaphorization remains relatively unexplored. Metaphorization highlights the extra effort translators make beyond conveying what is already in the source text. It is therefore interesting to explore what metaphors translators add to their translations, to understand the contexts in which translators utilize metaphorization, and to discuss the potential influence of metaphorization as such. Taking political discourse as a grounding owing to its richness in metaphor and expressiveness in communicating ideology, this paper seeks to provide some tentative insights into these questions based on a parallel corpus comprising Chinese source texts and English target texts. Drawing on recent developments in cognitive metaphor theories, the phenomenon of metaphorization is analyzed from linguistic, cognitive, and communicative perspectives.