CLER Conversation

You are warmly invited to join us to welcome our new colleague, Dr Sarah Daniel, who will present a talk on her recent research project. All welcome to attend, including MA students with an interest in language research.

WAR, WALL and WATER metaphors for immigration: A product, process, and corpus-based study of translation and post-editing of French left-wing journalism by professionals and translation students

The news media uses dehumanising metaphors like a “flood” or an “invasion” to describe immigrants, presenting these displaced people as a threat to potential host countries. Metaphorical expressions are difficult to translate as they often cannot be understood from their component parts and rely on cultural or situational knowledge to understand.

This study examined a corpus of articles containing the keyword “immigration” published in French in Le Monde diplomatique (LMd) from 2009 to 2019. Metaphorical expressions from the WAR, WATER and WALL/CONTAINER domains were identified and their framing compared with that found in previous studies. The treatment of these expressions in the published translations in English and Spanish were analysed. Professional translators and translation students working into English and Spanish were asked to translate half, and post-edit the other half, of an extract from the corpus. Participants recorded their processes which were analysed to establish which expressions they found difficult and whether they considered the metaphoricity of the expressions while translating or post-editing.

This study found that LMd inverted the typical framings for just under a third (32.5%) of the WAR and WALL metaphors, contrasting with previous findings that centre left and right publications use similar metaphors and framings. A novel typology of translation solutions for metaphor, based on Kovecses’ Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory, was proposed. This draws precise distinctions between the types of changes made to metaphorical expressions in translation and highlights cases where detail is added or removed in the target text. The study found that not all participants considered the metaphoricity of the expressions and those that did, did not interact with all expressions in this way. The majority of expressions participants treated as metaphor were classified as potentially deliberate, highlighting the role that Deliberate Metaphor Theory could play in explaining how translators interact with metaphor.

Dr Sarah Daniel passed her PhD viva in July this year. Her thesis was entitled “War, wall and water metaphors for immigration: a product, process, and corpus-based study of translation and post-editing of French left-wing journalism by professionals and translation students” and was a joint project between Swansea University and Université Grenoble Alpes. Her background is in translation, and she has worked in various roles in the industry. She has also taught English as a foreign language to children and adults, and English for Academic Purposes to pre-Masters students. She has joined the University of Leeds to work with Professor Alice Deignan on the “Young people, figurative language and criticality” project.