Arabic death discourse in translation: Euphemism and metaphorical conceptualization in Jordanian obituaries

Abstract

Some events are too distasteful and coarse to be approached without linguistic ‘gymnastics’ or ‘maneuvering’. One of these is undoubtedlydeath, a timeless taboo in which psychological, religious, and social interdictions coexist. This paper investigates the conceptualization and translation of the euphemistic metaphorical encoding operative in Arabic death discourse, particularly in a selected corpus consisting of 450 obituaries, drawn from three respectable Jordanian newspapers, where the sentimentalization of death, deriving from orthodox Muslim beliefs, provided a fertile soil for the burgeoning of metaphorical fatalism-laden euphemism. Given the pervasiveness of metaphor to refer to human mortality, the present study utilizes the influential “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” advanced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to account for the different conceptual metaphors, and their relevant linguistic instantiations which substituted the notions ofdeathanddying. The analysis also reveals that the translation hurdles encountered essentially originate from the fact that Arabic and English offer conflicting prototypical models ofagency, thereby landing the translator with the laborious task of negotiating the meaning between two contrasting cultural models, which has been found to strip the source language text from its dynamism, and, consequently, to procure irredressable translation loss, however satisfactory the translation equivalents may be.