Translating conceptual metaphor in Mandela's Long walk to freedom : a cross-cultural comparison

Abstract

Since the publication of the seminal work by Lakoff and Johnson (1980a), Metaphors we live by, countless research has been done on metaphor. This research was conducted because, in the past, metaphor was considered a deviant and poetic device that could be used only by those who were skilful. These scholars offered another view: metaphor is a matter of thought. They showed that linguistic metaphor is the manifestation of conceptual metaphors that are in our subconscious mind and are found in every day language. In other words, metaphors are a revelation of how we think. Linguists and translation scholars claim that it is a challenge to translate metaphor. The main objective of this study is to determine how conceptual metaphor theory can contribute towards the development of translation in African languages. The study seeks to identify conceptual metaphors in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, which was written in English, and then analyse how these were translated into isiXhosa and isiZulu. This implies that this study involves a corpus. In identifying metaphors from the source text a Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU), which was conceived by Steen and his colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, was used (Steen et al 2010). ParaConc concordancer was used to investigate and compare how the metaphors were translated. The results showed that most metaphors were translated the same way in isiXhosa and isiZulu, which implies that the translators conceptualised the metaphors in the same way. These results revealed that the translators’ styles were similar. This confirms the fact that the two languages are related. As scholars in earlier research indicated, metaphors in translation pose a problem, yet the translators of Mandela’s book successfully met this challenge. They were able to render the metaphors in their respective languages in an acceptable manner. They tried to adhere to the style of the source text writer, but traces of their own style are evident in the texts.