Using a Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach to Translate Metaphors: A Case Study of Animal Farm

Abstract

This article focuses on metaphor translation on cognitive pragmatic approach and classifying them. The main material of this study belongs to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and its translation that done by Saleh Hosseini and Masoomeh Nabizadeh (2003). The theoretical frameworks that considered in this article are the cognitive pragmatic theory and strategies raised by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). This study concluded that metaphors are often considered to be mere acts of rhetoric, recent research in cognitive and pragmatic theories has suggested that metaphors are much more fundamental in the normal act of comprehension. These theoretical perspectives regard metaphors as a basic tool from which more abstract concepts are constructed from others which are more concrete. Moreover, this study places the experts’ use of metaphor to communicate deep scientific knowledge that laymen would not normally understand related to these theories of metaphor. It can be argued translation and speech acts share many of the same general characteristics; both are acts of communication which take place within a certain socio-cultural context. For the most part this principally consists of linguistic aspects and based on an underlying cognitive frame work. The cognitive theories of metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003) have demonstrated that metaphors are much more than a cultural symbol or ornamentational within a discourse, but a cognitive phenomenon that takes place in order to categorize and understand experience.