Tracing Metaphor Transformations in Translation of Fiction by Type and Density

Heavily neglected by language scholars and ascribed poetics value only, metaphor was reinvented by Lakoff and Johnsons' iconic study in the 1980s, which showed its pervasiveness in language and thought. Paradoxically, though, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, especially in its early variants, alienated metaphor research from poetics. The latter has slowly been finding its feet in conceptual metaphor studies, especially with the help of newly developed fields of linguistic research such as corpus studies, which allow for obtaining of ample material for cross-cultural analysis. This paper is an example of such an analysis and aims by identifying the conceptual metaphors behind the metaphorical linguistic expressions in key texts from five of the greatest stylists of the English language, and by comparing them to their translations into Bulgarian, to find out whether metaphor is lost or transformed in any way. The main methodological tool used in the current paper is parallel text analysis. Our findings regarding literature in translation, suggest that the target texts (the translated ones) are not inferior in terms of metaphor type and density to the original ones and are appropriate for close reading.