A cross-linguistic study of metaphor variation in promotional discourse of the tourist sector in spanish, english and germanimplications for translation

Resumen

This dissertation focusses on the cross-linguistic variation of metaphorical language use on promotional tourism websites in British English, German of Germany and European Spanish. Despite the economic impact of the tourism industry and the high demand for translations in this branch, only few studies have ventured into metaphor use in tourism promotion so far. Research into metaphor translation in this field is even scarcer. The present study aims to fill these voids by describing metaphorical language use of this register for each language, comparing the results with the other two languages, and by seeking possible implications of the observed variation for the translatability as well as the translation process of metaphor vehicles. For this purpose, three comparable corpora of regional promotional tourism websites from England, Germany and Spain were compiled, as well as three smaller, 20,000-word sample corpora. In a two-step process, the sample corpora first underwent a comprehensive manual metaphor analysis, which helped to identify metaphor groups with a source-target domain combination that is problematic from a translational point of view. These groups were further studied in the large corpora using source-domain vocabulary searches. The study was approached from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective, building mainly on Conceptual Metaphor Theory. One of the main contributions of this dissertation lies in the adaptation of the widely used metaphor identification procedure MIP (Pragglejaz, 2007) for the cross-linguistic comparison of the morphologically different research languages. Furthermore, a typology of mapping schemes and a description of the source and target domains were suggested which suit translation purposes better than existing ones. Finally, a methodology for the determination of the literal translatability of metaphor vehicles was developed. The findings suggest that the metaphor use on promotional tourism websites in the three languages is largely similar with regard to the existence of different metaphor types and their distribution. However, differences can be found in their frequencies, their preferred linguistic realisation and their main discursive functions. The observed cross-linguistic variation in metaphor use can often be related to the markedly distinct styles of the promotional websites in the three languages. The data gathered in this study provide translators with information about which type of metaphor can or even should be reduced or increased in number in order to achieve a natural sounding translation and how morphologically necessary suppressions can best be compensated for, depending on the language pair and translation direction.