engleski

Metonymy across languages, cultures, and translations

Metonymy and metaphor are treated in cognitive linguistics as basic links between the language and thought, as cognitive mechanisms that help us transform thoughts into utterances. The aim of this paper is first to show the universality and ubiquity of metonymy as a cognitive mechanism used across languages and cultures, but also to illustrate the possibility of its exploitation as a useful translation tool. By investigating several instances of screen translation from English into Croatian, it will be shown that in cases of translating certain semantic groups of culture-based items there is a tendency towards a change in the type of metonymic mapping used in the target language. We will further examine the motivation for this phenomenon, hypothesizing whether the relative consistency of this tendency may, on the one hand, indicate the inherent difference in the metonymic modelling of the world that exists in the two languages under observation, and may prove to be a metonymy-based translation tool used to bridge the cultural gap that exists between them. It follows that metonymy is at work not within a language, but also across languages in the translation process, as evidenced in our corpus examples, which is another piece of evidence in support of its universal character.

metonymy; metaphor; translation strategies; translating culture

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