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. Snell-Hornby (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.