The Metaphor in Literature and the Effect on Translation

As Dagut (1976: 32) pointed out, the particular cultural experiences and semantic associations exploited by translation and the extent to which these can, or cannot, be produced non-anomalously into the target language, depending on the degree of overlap in each particular case, constitute the basis for the translatability of a metaphor. SnellHornby (1995: 41) stated that the extent to which a text is translatable varies with the degree to which it is embedded in its own specific culture. This paper focuses on the translation of metaphor as a cultural concept. It is based on Newmark’s (1982: 84-95) theory of translation and uses Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as the corpus for metaphor analysis. Through contrastive analysis we aim to discover and we highlight the ways in which metaphors in an English fictional text are rendered in Greek and German. Linguistic frames and cultural images and influences are taken into account by comparing the metaphorical reproductions in German and Greek.


Introduction
According to Aristotle (Poetics,57b (21) 2), " [m]etaphor is the application of a strange term either transferred from the genus and applied to the species, or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy". What Aristotle wants to highlight is the notion of 'transfer', which is also adopted by Macadam (1975: 747), who states that "[m]etaphor (translation) occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another because the similarity seems to justify this transference".
Metaphor is a pervasive and influential phenomenon in interaction. For example, Kovesces (2002) highlights the different categories of metaphors and their impact on culture. Furthermore, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) mention the impact of metaphor on everyday language and even on our perception of the world. Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 12) believe that "a culture may be thought of as providing, among other things, a pool of available metaphors for making sense of reality". Metaphors are rooted in the culture of a nation and reflect their cultural beliefs and values. Consequently, metaphors are culture-specific, and different cultures conceptualize the world in different ways.
Some scholars claim that cultural specific features produce associations in the source language (SL), but not in the target language. Many metaphors include the cultural experience and therefore the translation is more demanding, especially when the influence of cultural specific phenomena and national characteristics is manifest.
Many translation studies scholars have considered various strategies of translating metaphors (Bassnett 1993;Lefevere 1993;Snell-Hornby 2006), which are: 1) direct translation: turning a metaphor into the same metaphor; 2) substitution: turning a metaphor into a different metaphor; 3) paraphrase: a shift to a nonfigurative equivalent.
Various scholars have pointed out the challenges involved in the use of metaphor. Dagut (1976: 32) believes that there is no simplistic general way to translate metaphors, depending on two critical points: "a) the particular cultural experiences and semantic associations exploited by them, and b) the extent to which these can, or cannot, be produced nonanomalously into the target language (TL), depending on the degree of overlap in each particular case." Dagut (1976: 28) also argues that "what determines the translatability of a SL metaphor is not its 'boldness' or 'originality', but rather the extent to which the cultural experience and semantic associations on which it draws are shared by speakers of the particular TL". Similarly, Al-Hassnawi maintains that the difficulty of the translation of the SL metaphor is not the lack of lexical equivalents in the TL but the diversity of cultural conceptualizations of an identical entity or word in the SL and TL (https://translationjournal.net/journal/ 41metaphor.htm ).
Finally, Snell-Hornby (1998: 95) states that "the extent to which a text is translatable varies not only with the degree to which it is embedded in its own specific culture, but also with the distance that separates the cultural background of the source text and the target audience in terms of time and space". Newmark (1988b: 94) defines culture as "the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expressions". In this sense, translation problems can arise, since transferring metaphors from the source language to the target one may be hampered by linguistic and cultural differences. While metaphor has been widely discussed within the field of translation, mainly with respect to transfer methods, what is generally known as a traditional metaphor is not the same as the metaphor meant by Newmark. He defines steps to be taken into account before thinking of grasping the very meaning of metaphor. Understanding the following terms is a prerequisite to understanding the metaphor: object, image, sense, metaphor, and metonym. Object is the item which is described by the metaphor. Image refers to the item in terms of which the object is described. Sense refers to the point of similarity between aspects of the objects and the image. Metonym refers to a one-word image that replaces the object, which is in many cases figurative but not metaphorical.

Peter Newmark on the Translatability of Metaphors
According to Newmark (1988: 106), any word can be a metaphor and therefore its primary meaning has to be matched against its linguistic and cultural contexts. A metaphor is defined as an indirect comparison between unrelated things. Newmark (1982: 84-96) distinguishes in this sense six concrete types of metaphors: dead, cliché, stock, adapted, recent and original.
Dead metaphors have lost their images due to overuse, e.g. square the circle, at the foot of the hill, the arm of a chair. They are without figurative meaning. They are often used when describing time and space, geographical objects and activities of people. Dead metaphors are often words that distinguish parts of the body, natural phenomena, and abstract astronomical concepts. Newmark places idioms, metonyms and synecdoche in this group.
Cliché metaphors are those that have lost their aesthetic sense and are used only in a connotative function, in order to express thoughts more clearly, often with a larger share of emotions. Cliché metaphors, however, do indicate a word or expression that is not ordinary. Some prominent examples are a transparent lie, stick out a smile and explore all avenues.
A stock metaphor is defined by Newmark (1988: 108) as one that "has certain emotional warmth and which is not deadened by overuse", such as he sees fear in my heart or his life hangs on a thread. Such metaphors are usually employed in non-formal texts. This type functions as an established metaphor that in an informal context is an efficient and concise method of covering a physical and/or mental situation both referentially and pragmatically. Other examples are: keep the pot boiling and to oil the wheels.
Adapted metaphors are stock metaphors that have been adapted into a new context by their speaker or writer. Proverbs can be placed in this category. An example is carrying gold to London, which is then adapted as almost carrying gold to London.
Recent metaphors are categorized by Newmark (1998: 110) as live metaphors. They are produced via coining or, as Newmark elaborates, "they are neologisms fashionable in the source language community". Often categorized as slang and colloquial, they are specific to each language. Some examples are greenback, groovy, pissed, fuzz.
The original metaphor is also known as a paralogical metaphor or antimetaphor. It is created from the SL's own original thoughts and ideas. It is new and fresh. Some examples are: I am the dog end of every day, a forest of fingers and they faced a scallywag of tasks.
As hinted above, Newmark's typology will be used later on to examine different kinds of metaphors.
Translating a metaphor involves much more than simply replacing words in one language with words in another. Metaphors have been widely discussed in terms of their translatability and of translation strategies. Newmark (1988: 48-49) defined seven strategies of metaphor translation that have almost always been taken up by the researchers and which are also considered here: 1. Reproducing the same image in the target language. This is the best way to translate stock metaphors, most frequently idioms. 2. Replacing the image in the source language with a standard image in the target language. It is used when there is no image that corresponds exactly to the one in the SL and which does not clash with the TL culture. 3. Translating metaphor by a simile. This strategy modifies an emotive metaphorical expression to suit the TL if that context is not as emotive in character as the SL. 4. Translating metaphor by way of a simile and sense. 5. Converting a metaphor to its sense. In this strategy, the image of the SL is reduced to its sense and rewritten to suit the TL. 6. Deleting a metaphor. It is used when the metaphor is redundant. 7. Combining the same metaphor with the sense.

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Translation of Metaphors
In the present paper the focus lies on the translation of metaphors presented in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray into English and German, as well as on the translation strategies followed by two Greek and two German translators. The motivation for considering Greek and German translations of the novel is to see whether the rendering of the metaphors differs in the two languages, which belong to different branches of the Indo-European family. The distinctions between the metaphors are based on Newmark's model presented in his book Approaches to Translation (Newmark, 1982: 84-96).
The translated metaphors will be considered whether they are: a. reproduced in the target language b. replaced by other metaphors c. omitted in the translated text d. transformed into literal expressions.

Greek translations
The Greek translations used for the study of the translatability of metaphors are: Το Πορτραίτο του Ντόριαν Γκρέι (To Portraito tou Dorian Gray), translated by A. Alexandrou (Greek text 1) and Το Πορτραίτο του Ντόριαν Γκρέι, (To Portraito tou Dorian Gray) translated by T. Stefanopoulou (Greek text 2). Τhe metaphors presented in the original text as well as their translation in the aforementioned Greek versions can be found in the Appendix as table 1, following the text flow.

German translations
The German translations used for the study of the translatability of metaphors are: Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray -ebook (http://sternchenland.com/erzaehlungen-sagen/mehr-autoren/oscar-wilde/ das-bildnis-des-dorian-gray; German text 1) and an online version (http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/das-bildnis-des-dorian-gray-1836/1; German text 2). Τhe metaphors presented in the original text as well as their translation in the aforementioned German versions can be found in the Appendix as table 2, following the text flow.

Contrastive analysis of the German and Greek translated metaphors
As can be seen in Figure 1, the highest percentage of metaphors presented in the original text includes original metaphors, followed by clichés, stock and finally dead ones:  As can be seen in Figs. 2 and 3, the translators mostly rendered the metaphors found in the original text with other metaphors in the target language. That is, metaphorical language is almost equally often used as a strategy by both the Greek and the German translators, whereas literal language is rare to find in the translated versions. The strategy mostly used by both the Greek and the German translators is the reproduction of the image (see Figures 4 and 5). Interestingly, the frequency with which the strategies of reproduction and substitution of metaphors are used in German is very similar to that of the Greek versions.
Given the findings displayed in the Figures 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, the analysis will be focused contrastively on specific excerpts in order to discuss the translatability of metaphors in the target languages considered. Table 3 presents some cliché metaphors in the original text, the translated versions and the strategies used by the translators in both German and Greek.
In particular, the strategy followed in the first German translation of the metaphor nothing can cure the soul is reproduction. The same metaphor has been rendered in the second German translation through the near-synonymic verb help. The Greek translation for this metaphor can be defined as a direct equivalent, since exactly the same metaphor exists in Greek.
The metaphor mad love is reproduced in German by using the adjectives sturmartig and wild in order to maintain its practicability. Surprisingly, in both Greek translations the metaphorical concept is rendered through the adjective unexpected, although it could be directly expressed with the equivalent Greek adjective τρελός. Moreover, the metaphor the heart is breaking also exists in German, whereas in Greek the metaphor is replaced by the verb µατώνω/ bleeding. It can be argued that the verb chosen is not functional, because in Modern Greek the expression mostly used in this context is ραγίζω, meaning almost broken. Finally, the metaphor break his word is reproduced exactly in both German translations. In Greek the metaphor is replaced by the verb αθετώ/ renege, because the metaphor to break one's word cannot be exactly reproduced in Greek. Table 4 presents some original metaphors in the original text and the translated versions and the strategies used by the translators in each language. The metaphor subtle influence is reproduced exactly in the German text. In the first Greek version, subtle is literally reproduced by the adjective by λεπταίσθητη/ subtle, while the second translation uses the replacement strategy with the adjective αδιόρατη/ invisible. In everyday Greek the aforementioned versions are rarely used. The choice of the translators can be justified here on the ground of register. Concerning the metaphor olive-coloured face, the German translators reproduce the metaphor exactly in the target language, whereas one of the Greek translators chooses to replace olive-coloured with the adjective µελαµψό/ dark. The other translation uses the adjective σταρένιο, which means wheaten. It can be evinced how differently cultures define skin colours from their points of view. In dead metaphors, a balance between German and Greek can be seen (see Table 5). The reason could be that dead metaphors are overused and are integrated in both languages.  Table 6 presents some stock metaphors in the original text and the translated versions and the strategies used by the translators in each language. Firstly, the metaphor frank blue eyes is exactly reproduced in one of the German translations as treuherzige, blaue Augen. The second German translation uses the adjective offen in order to express frank. The same can be remarked about one of the Greek translations, where the adjective frank is replaced by καθαρά/ clear. The expression I get hungry for her presence is once again exactly reproduced in German by using derivative verbs Ich hungere nach ihrem Anblick/Ich hungere nach ihrer Gegenwart. In both Greek translations, the same expression is replaced by the derivative verb of the adjective thirsty, as the particular verb is commonly used in Greek to express strong desire. Finally, concerning the metaphor depth of generosity, it is interesting to note that in one of the German translations depth is replaced by the expression Chimborasso, a volcano in Ecuador, and by Gipfel/ peak in the second version. Thus, in both cases antonyms have been used to express depth of generosity. In the first Greek translation, the expression άκρων άοτων is used in order to replace the particular metaphor. The second Greek translation keeps the image by using the direct equivalent of the noun depth.

Conclusions
Both the German and Greek translators of the Oscar Wilde's A Portrait of Dorian Gray chose to maintain its metaphors in nearly all cases. This paper reflects on metaphors in an English fictional text with respect to their translatability and to what gets lost in translating them, their originality, cultural background or target language richness. In all the translations considered, German and Greek, the translators chose to maintain the metaphors, perhaps to preserve the accuracy of the literary style.
On close examination, the results suggest there may be more similarities in metaphorical expressions between German and English than between English and Greek. One might assume that they "share" a culture, as they belong to the same family of languages. Yet, metaphors cannot be always transferred intact from a source language to a target language; in many cases the translators' intent to reproduce the metaphors in the target language was not successful. Possibly out of respect towards the original text, a masterpiece, the translators did not attempt to range further from the original metaphor.
Furthermore, metaphors are cognitive devices for forming and communicating conceptualizations of reality. In this sense, translation strategies should focus on such items as source language, target language, culture and style. The cognitive approach mainly initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) has repeatedly demonstrated that metaphors are not just decorative elements of rhetoric, but rather basic resources for thought processes in human society. According to Dagut (1976), the main aspect of metaphors is shocking for the reader: a metaphor is not translatable if its combination with cultural experiences and semantic associations in the source language cannot be reproduced.
For Newmark (1988), there are no universal metaphors that can be used in each culture in the same way. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 12) state, "[t]o live by a metaphor is to have your reality structured by that metaphor and to base your perceptions and actions upon that structuring of reality", and this perception may certainly vary from one culture to the next.