Identificação e tradução de metáforas lingüísticas e conceptuais em abstracts da esfera acadêmica: uma análise baseada em lingüística de corpus

Abstract

Corpus Linguistics has recently begun to make inroads into two major fields of linguistic inquiry: metaphor (Deignan, 2005) and translation (Baker, 1993; 1995; 1996; 1998;1999). Metaphor is a central figure of language and thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) which shapes our conceptualization of the world. On the other hand, translators have increasingly utilized the tools made available by Corpus Linguistics to unveil the actual threads researchers follow in order to make translations from one language to another. In such context, the study hereby detailed aims at focusing metaphors as cognitive phenomena. More specifically, the research aims to identify the linguistic and conceptual metaphors in a corpus of academic sphere and subsequently focus the study of metaphor translations under a cognitive approach. For this purpose, methodology started by collecting a parallel corpus of bilingual abstracts of thesis and dissertations in Applied Linguistics, firstly written in Portuguese and then translated into English. The corresponding analysis was based on corpus-driven procedures whereby the evidences gathered have led to questions to be investigated. The study utilized the LC tools (Metaphor Identification Program, Concord and Parallel Concordander) in order to present a safer and wider data analysis. Due to language metaphor richness, the metaphor identification program was used to point out the most probable metaphors in the corpus. Later on, in order to determine the metaphors effectively used and translated, both corpora originals and translations were automatically aligned and submitted to the parallel concordancer for comparison purposes. The results point to a significantly high number of conceptual correlations between metaphors in the original and translated abstracts; nevertheless, in some cases metaphors were missing or mistranslated. If, as Lakoff e Johnson states, metaphors structure the way we understand the world, then these metaphorical shifts may influence how abstracts are understood in both languages