A New Building on an Old Foundation: Re-evaluation of Traditional Strategies for Translating Conceptual Metaphors

Considering the ubiquity of conceptual metaphors in different text types, the researchers try in this study to identify strategies used by Iranian undergraduate EFL students in translating two types (Orientational and Ontological) of such metaphors from English into Persian. After selecting a group of students and ensuring their homogeneity in terms of comprehension of the source language, a metaphor translation test was administered. The results of the test were analyzed based on Larson’s (1984) metaphor translation strategies by two coders so as to investigate the validity of such classical strategies for translating modern, conceptual metaphors. The results of the study showed that most of the participants had used the first strategy, namely keeping the source metaphor in the target text. Moreover, a significant relationship was found to be present between the type of the conceptual metaphor and the selected translation strategy. The results of this study can shed more light on the pattern of metaphor recognition and translation by EFL students, who might become professional translators sooner or later. In addition, attending to the identified relationship, a tentative model can be proposed for translating conceptual metaphors.