Metaphors and Japan : Translating Conceptual Metaphors from a Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette

Abstract: The metaphor is known for creating problems when it comes to translation, not only because of cultural aspects but also because of a lack of a unified terminology and theory for translation strategies. This also applies to conceptual metaphors which are the subject of analysis in this paper where an English survival guide to the Japanese culture has been translated into Swedish. As both languages are of the Germanic family, the hypothesis argues that the relation between them is noticeable in the translation work as well as a tendency towards paraphrasing due to a richer vocabulary in the source language. Regarding conceptual metaphors, the aim is to analyse if there are any correlations between the type of metaphor and the choice of translation strategy as well as what factors affects said strategies.  The results not only showed that the distribution of translation strategies supports the preferred order of priority in the background theory but also that there were very noticeable differences within the three metaphor categories. Factors affecting these results were found to differ between the categories due to the distinct differences in the metaphorical structures. These findings suggest that there indeed are correlations between the metaphor categories and their translation strategies. The closeness between the source and target languages were also found to be evident while at the same time indicating a tendency toward paraphrasing.