Walking and Wandering among Mountains and Monsters : A study of metaphors and lexical variation in translation in a text about the Lake District

Abstract: This essay studies the translation of metaphorical concepts and lexical variation in relation to walking in a text about hiking in the Lake District. These two linguistic features are deemed to be important in fulfilling the communicative intention of the source text and the aim of the essay is to investigate to what extent these two linguistic features have been retained translation and what motivates different translation strategies. The qualitative study of metaphors focuses on the metaphorical concept THE LAKE DISTRICT IS A PERSON analyses how often different translation strategies are employed when translating metaphors. The results show that which strategy was preferred depended on whether the metaphor was lexicalised or novel and a qualitative analysis aims to explain these differences in preference. A qualitative study of the lexical variation regarding walking between the two languages found the number of different words used to be fairly similar in both languages. Context was determined to be more important than the exact meaning when translating words related to hiking. At times context therefore also motivated a single word to be translated into several different words in the target text or vice versa.