Metaphor, Translation and Human Rights: The Arab Charter as a Case Study

Abstract Metaphors are deeply embedded in their cultural contexts, making their translation a complex task, as it is often difficult to find an equivalent that preserves the metaphor’s original meaning and cultural resonance. Although metaphor translation has been extensively explored in many fields, it remains understudied in human rights discourse. This study addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of the 2004 Arab Charter on Human Rights and its United Nations English translation, drawing on Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Metaphors we live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Lindqvist’s (Högt och lågt i skönlitterär översättning till Svenska, Hallgren och Fallgren, Uppsala, 2005) taxonomy of metaphor translation strategies. The Arabic and English texts are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively to identify the translation strategies and investigate the underlying conceptualizations of human rights within the interplay between universality and cultural specificity. This analysis is guided by the following research questions: (1) How are the metaphors identified in the Arab Charter rendered in the English translations? (2) To what extent do the employed strategies preserve or modify the conceptual and cultural framework of the metaphors? (3) How do these strategies affect the universality of human rights? The findings reveal that image transfer was the most frequent strategy, mainly preserving personification-based metaphors, while the remaining metaphors were adapted through the strategies of substitution, reduction to sense, and omission. The prevalence of image transfer may universalize human rights’ metaphors, yet these adaptations produce conceptual shifts that may obscure the source culture and potentially impede intercultural understanding.