The Knight in the Panther's Skin: Comparing corpora of image metaphors in the source text and its translations, spanning different cultural or temporal contexts

The corpus-based study analyzes image metaphors in the translations of Shota Rustaveli’s 12th - century Georgian poem by Marjory Wardrop (20th -century British English) and Lyn Coffin (21st -century American English) drawing on the theoretical frameworks of cognitive linguistics, cognitive poetics, cognitive translation studies, social and anthropological theories. The study incorporates Atran’s (1998) anthropological theory, lapping the phenomenon of adaptive radiation (AR) over the poetic image metaphor translation. Our findings position translation as an act of cultural-cognitive evolution, introducing AR as a model for poetic metaphor translation. By analyzing 37 image metaphors in 74 translations, we explore how mappings in the source and target texts interact within image clusters and with the underlaid image schemas (CONTAINER, PATH, FORCE). We summed up four critical pitfalls that AR shifts entail. The study contributes to cognitive metaphor studies, as well as corpus-based cognitive translation studies, situating translation as an act of cultural and cognitive evolution.