Removal and Omission of Fiction Synesthetic Metaphors in English-Ukrainian Translation

Abstract

This paper investigates omission and removal of synesthetic metaphoric descriptions in English-Ukrainian translations of Celeste Ng’s novel “Everything I Never Told You”. A synesthetic metaphor is viewed as a product of mapping between two different domains of human experience, which are both of sensory nature. The mappings instantiate in synesthetic metaphoric descriptions. The study resorts to the methodological tools of cognitive metaphor translation theory and the affordances of corpus linguistics and quantitative analysis to reveal the correlation between the choice of removal/omission of the source-text synesthetic metaphoric descriptions and the linguacultural specificity/universality of their metaphorical mappings. The results suggest that omission/removal is explained by the linguacultural features of the source-target text cross-sensory mappings and the translators’ free choices. Omission can be accounted for by a translator’s choice to avoid redundancy. Removal occurs if the target-text equivalent synesthetic metaphoric description a) is based on a cross-sensory mapping not embedded in the target linguaculture, b) rests on a different semantic specification of a structurally identical cross-sensory mapping, or c) has a lower degree of conventionality than its non-metaphoric periphrasis.