Cross-Cultural Pragmatics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory: The Translation of Idiomatic Expressions

Abstract

Pragmatics is a field of linguistics that observes the use of language as a social human behaviour and examines how linguistic features and contextual influences interact in translation studies. Cross-cultural pragmatics emphasizes the necessity of examining discourses on the basis of cultural context. Interpreting the translated text at the cross-cultural pragmatics level and examining cognitive processes are common areas of translation studies and pragmatics. For this reason, it is known that this field brings a new perspective to translation studies in terms of contextual meaning creation, reception, interpretation and analysis. Translation and interpretation of idiomatic expressions is one of the most problematic areas for the translator since s/he has to work as a bilateral negotiator on the basis of cross-cultural influences in both the source language and the target language. At this point, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory that guides the translator enables us to see language and translation studies as a field of social practice by analysing the similarities and differences between cultures. In this context, the main purpose of this study is to examine the problems experienced during the translation of idiomatic expressions and to focus on the similarities and differences between metaphorical conceptualizations of both languages (English and Turkish) on the basis of cross-cultural pragmatics. Thus, some translation examples taken from an authentic source are presented in order to show how metaphor is handled in translation. In these examples, how translators handle metaphorical expressions is discussed on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory in terms of similarities and differences between languages.