IDIOMS BETWEEN MOTIVATION AND TRANSLATION

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In other words, idioms are conceptual and not linguistic in nature. .... this idiomatic expression appeared in French in the 14th C and the term chair originally ...
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IDIOMS BETWEEN MOTIVATION AND TRANSLATION Prep. univ. Oana Dugan, Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi The paper tries to explain how motivation can influence the translation process of idioms from one language into another. Consequently, it tries to prove that most idioms are products of our conceptual system and not simply matters of language. An idiom is not just an expression that has a meaning that is somehow special in relation to the meanings of its constituting parts, but it arises from our more general knowledge of the world, embodied in our mentality and in our conceptual system. In other words, idioms are conceptual and not linguistic in nature. From this point of view, the meaning of idioms can be seen as motivated and not as arbitrary. This paper also tries to study idioms from a cross-linguistic perspective, analyzing their functioning in three different languages and the translation problems arising from linguistic as well as cultural differences. In a broad sense, an idiom is a long-lived group of words characteristic of a language (sometimes impossible to translate ad litteram into another language), comprising grammatical collocations and phrases (fusions, unities and free combinations), most of them being based on degraded metaphors; in a strict sense, an idiom is tantamount to a phraseological fusion. According to The Oxford Companion to the English Language (OUP 1992), the term idiom finds its etymology in Latin idioma and Greek idíōma meaning at the beginning a specific property, a special phrasing, from idios = one’s own, personal, private. Archaically, there has been another term, idiotism which has two acceptations. On the one hand it denotes the speech proper to, or typical of, a people or place; a dialect or local language; the unique quality or ‘genius’ of a language. On the other hand it denotes an expression unique to a language, especially one whose sense is not predictable from the meanings and arrangement of its elements, such as kick the bucket, a slang term meaning ‘to die’, which has nothing to do with kicking or buckets. Leviţchi (1976) defines idioms as “special forms of speech that are peculiar to the instinct of a language…”, they can also be considered, as W. McMordie (1967) does, as “peculiar uses of particular words, and also particular phrases or turns of expressions which, from long usage, have become stereotyped.” As far as metaphor is concerned, linguists generally agree that it plays an important part in the formation and existence of idioms. “Idioms are essentially connected with metaphors of the degraded type. Since “idioms are connected with degraded metaphors”, this happens because metaphors – as many other language matters, may be studied from the point of view of their life and duration. Accordingly, distinction can be made between live metaphors, degraded (fading) metaphors and dead metaphors. Degraded metaphors still convey to the speakers of a language some of their initial freshness, although they have already become trite. Let us consider, for instance to sift the evidence (“a examina dovezile”). In this example, the verb to sift still preserves its semantic connection with its concrete meaning. It is the long-lived character of the degraded metaphors that links metaphor to idioms. Cognitive linguistics has proved that metaphor is a mapping between two cognitive domains. Mappings or conceptual correspondences usually follow a subconscious pattern of comparing items from different domains which have some minor but obvious characteristics. Cognitive linguists see metaphor not as a chunk of language, (sentence, phrase or whatever), but as

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‘a model of thought defined by a systematic mapping from a source to a target domain (Lakoff 1980, 1987)1 manifested in a chunk of language. A conceptual metaphor is hence a unidirectional linking of two different concepts, such that some of the attributes of one (e.g. MONEY) are transferred to the other (e.g. IDEAS). The use of the term metaphor is restricted to the conceptual frame, so the linguistic realization of a conceptual metaphor is not called a metaphor, but a metaphoric expression. (Lakoff 1993)2 One of the most important claims of cognitive metaphor theory is that any language contains connected systems of conventional metaphorical expressions instantiating basic conceptual metaphors or root analogies, which are shared because they derive from common experience with the world and serve as ‘part of our conceptual apparatus’. (Lakoff and Turner 1989)3 From the point of view of their functioning, conceptual metaphors bring into correspondence two domains of knowledge. One is called the source domain and the other one is the target domain. The source domain is typically applied to provide understanding about the target. Thus different life concepts may be understood metaphorically. As far as idioms and metaphors are concerned, many idioms are products of our conceptual system and not simply matters of language (i.e. of the lexicon). An idiom is not just an expression that has a meaning that is somehow special in relation to the meanings of its constituting parts, but it arises from our more general knowledge of the world. In other words, idioms are conceptual and not linguistic in nature. Since metaphors can be described as matters of language but also as being conceptual, and since idioms are connected with degraded metaphors (conceptual metaphors being almost “so ordinary that we do not recognize their metaphorical character”), we may rightly infer that idioms and metaphors are mutually dependent. Mention should be made that there are other lexical and semantic processes that “affect” idioms. Among these are folk-etymology and metonymy. Folk-etymology sometimes affects phrases, not only words, e.g. the standardized simile as mad as a hatter. E. Radford notes “the reproach has nothing to do with hatters. They are as sane as anybody else.” It was originally as mad as an atter. Atter was the Anglo-Saxon for viper or adder; and mad was anciently used in the sense of “venomous”. Thus the expression mad as an atter meant “as venomous as a viper”. Metonymy, too, has an influence on the coming into being of idioms. Classically speaking, metonymy is a figure of speech by means of which the name of an object is replaced by one of its significant attributes or by some function that it discharges. In cognitive linguistics, metonymy is distinguished by metaphor in such a way that metonymy is characterized as typically involving one conceptual domain, rather than two distinct ones (as is the case of metaphor). Metonymy involves a “stand for” conceptual relationship between two entities, while metaphor involves an “is” or “is understood as” relationship between two conceptual domains. Idioms constitute one of the most difficult areas of foreign language learning and also of translations. This situation makes it sufficiently worthwhile for us to see what cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics can contribute to the translation of idioms. The standard view on idioms does not deal with the nature of conceptual complexity of idiomaticity. Classically speaking, such issues as the systematic nature of many idioms, the conceptual mappings that are responsible for much of the meaning of many idioms, the motivated nature of many idioms and the various kinds of cognitive mechanisms (like metaphor, metonymy, conventional knowledge) on which many idioms are based, are not taken into account. Certain relationships between words are recognized, but these are only certain sense relations, such as homonymy, synonymy, polysemy and antonymy. Idioms may be seen as standing 1

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Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1980, Metaphors We Live by. Chicago; University of Chicago Press

Lakoff, George. The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought. Edited by Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: CUP 3 Lakoff, G. & Turner, Mark, 1989. More than Cool Reason. A Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press

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in the same relationships. It should be noticed that these are relations of linguistic meanings, not relations in a conceptual system. In the traditional view, linguistic meaning is divorced from the human, conceptual system and encyclopedic knowledge that speakers of a language share. One major stumbling block in understanding and subsequently in translating idioms is that they are regarded as linguistic expressions that are independent of any conceptual system and that are isolated from each other at the conceptual level. Thus, an important generalization can be made: many idioms, better said, most idioms, are products of our conceptual system and not simply matters of language. An idiom is not just an expression that has a meaning that is somehow special in relation to the meanings of its constituting parts, but it arises from our more general knowledge of the world, embodied in our mentality and in our conceptual system. In other words, idioms are conceptual and not linguistic in nature. From this point of view, the meaning of idioms can be seen as motivated and not as arbitrary. Knowledge of the world provides the motivation for the overall idiomatic meaning. This is against the prevailing dogma, which maintains that idioms are arbitrary pairings of forms (each with a meaning) and a special overall meaning. When the meaning of an idiom is said to be motivated, it does not necessarily mean that its meaning is fully predictable. In other words, no claim is made that, given the non-idiomatic meaning of an idiom, one can predict what the idiomatic meaning will be that is associated with the words. Motivation is a much weaker notion than prediction. And in some cases, there is no conceptual motivation for the meaning of idioms at all (see for instance to kick the bucket). The motivation for the occurrence of particular words in a large number of idioms can be thought of as a cognitive mechanism that links domains of knowledge to idiomatic meanings. The kinds of mechanisms relevant in the case of many idioms are metaphor, metonymy and the conventional knowledge. Kövecses and Szabo describe this mechanism in the following diagram: IDIOMATIC MEANING: the overall special meaning of an idiom COGNITIVE MECHANISMS: metaphor, metonymy, conventional knowledge (=domain(s) of knowledge) CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN(S): one or more domains of knowledge LINGUISTIC FORMS AND THEIR MEANINGS: the words that comprise an idiom, their syntactic properties, together with their meanings Conventional knowledge can often account for a particular idiomatic meaning in a direct way. Metaphor and metonymy are viewed as cognitive mechanisms that relate a domain of knowledge to an idiomatic meaning in an indirect way. We would like to suggest that the implication of these ideas for translating idioms is that this kind of motivation should facilitate the translatability of idioms. Let us see how metaphor, metonymy and conventional knowledge motivate the meaning of idioms and the way they help facilitate the translation process. For instance, the expression to make one’s flesh creep finds equivalents in French in donner la chair de poule and in Romanian in a i se face pielea găină. It seems that the Romanian expression is somewhat equivalent to the French one, thus not being very sure if it is a neologism in Romanian, or the creation of the Romanian speaking community. It is interesting to notice that in all three languages the expression is related to the aspect of skin. Perfect equivalence is to be found between English and Romanian in the use of the verbs to make and a face and in the use of the personal pronoun one and i (the unaccentuated form in Romanian). According to Claude Duneton4, 4

Duneton, Claude1991, La puce à l’oreille, Ed. Balland, Paris

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this idiomatic expression appeared in French in the 14th C and the term chair originally meant “peau” (skin). In the 17th C, the expression in French was faire venir la chair de d’oison. This means that the comparative term was the geese, the meat of which was very frequently eaten. The “animal” was to be found at the market usually without feathers and the resemblance of the animal’s skin to the human skin was thus registered for the first time. Later on, in the 18th C the hen took the place of the geese in the idiomatic expression, and it was firstly mentioned in a dictionary in 1836 as “figurée et familier, faire venir la chair de poule = frissonner, tressaillir”. So the idiom was associated with the idea of fear, of something unpleasant happening to a person. It is to be noted that there is equivalence between the French and the English expression, too, when it comes to the direct object, (flesh – chair). In English, too, according to Pascal Soufflet, flesh originally denoted the skin. Now, let us see how the idiom functions cognitively, since by discussing the equivalences in English, French and Romanian, we may infer that the idiom is built on the same cultural model. In English, as well as in French, the idiom is associated with the idea of fear. Pascal Soufflet mentions that “to creep= ramper. La sensation qu’engendre la peur est celle d’une substance étrangère qui rampe sur le corps.”5 It seems that nowadays the expression is still related to fear in all three languages, but it also seems that the meaning has restricted in Romanian and in French to the feeling one has when being cold. “Aujourd’hui, la chair de poule sert plus banalement à exprimer le frisson atmosphérique du fond de l’air qui fraîchit – ou parfois encore le froid dans le dos de la répulsion physique.”6 Therefore one may infer that for Romanian and French the cognitive mechanism of this idiom would be based on the mapping metaphor FEAR IS CHILLINESS and on the metonymy THE SKIN STANDS FOR THE EFFECT / ASPECT. Bearing in mind these mechanisms, the translator would thus be able to look for equivalents in target languages in connection with the terms coldness, chilliness, fear and skin. It is interesting to observe that in English as well, the idiom is based on the metonymy THE SKIN STANDS FOR THE EFFECT even though the metaphor FEAR IS CHILLINESS does not entirely apply here. Another idiom to be taken into account is to take French leave. We have decided to select this idiom, because of the “amusing” equivalence it finds in French and in Romanian, viz. filer à l’anglaise and a o şterge englezeşte, and a o şterge la papuc. What is interesting at a first glance is that on the territory of the English language the expression was influenced by the French culture, on the territory of the French language the locution was influenced by the English culture. The authentic Romanian locution was influenced by the Oriental habit of discalceation. The Romanian expression a o şterge englezeşte is undoubtedly a loan translation, which entered the language after the second half of the 19th C or perhaps even later, in the 20th C. Now let us see what meaning these “equivalent” expressions have acquired in all three languages. Filer à l’anglaise, meaning “to leave without asking permission”, seems to have a long account in French due to the mutually influencing cultures and history. Maurice Rat sees the association of the English culture with the lack of permission as an allusion to the bluntness and lack of politeness of the British people. Nevertheless, the locution has acquired a much longer tradition in French. Its origin can be traced back to the 100 years war. Claude Duneton (1991) notes that : “ Du XVe au XIXe siècle un “anglais” designait un créancier, un usurier: Oncques ne vis anglais de votre taille / Car tout à coup vous criez : Baille ! Baille!, dit Clément Marot – sans doute en souvenir des impôts et des taux diverses levés, par “le parti anglais”, au cours de la guerre 5

Creep= 1. to gradually fill or cover a place; 2 to climb up or along a particular place. The idea implied by Soufflet finds its meaning in the 2nd sense of the term creep. Soufflet links it to the feeling one has when something “climbs up” his/her skin. 6 “Nowadays, the expression “la chair de poule” seems to be associated with the feeling one has when the atmospheric conditions change, the air becoming cooler. This does not, however, exclude, the sensation of cold one has when being afraid of something.” (Translation ours, O.D.)

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de Cent Ans.”7 It seems that the locution is also related to the mutual accusations of cowardice between the British and the French armies, along the centuries. Raspail notes in 1866 that “Wellington, general en chef de l’armée anglaise, toujours battu en Espagne par nos simples généraux, jamais vainqueur (…) profitait de l’ombre de la nuit pour s’esquiver sans tambour ni trompettes, dès qu’il voyait la furie française.”8 But it seems that the locution filer à l’anglaise was not so much in use in the 19th C. It appeared published for the first time at the beginning of the 20th C in the form of some verses: “Oh! Ça fait voir d’quoi t’es crevé; Chacun se z’yeute avec malaise, Le Monssieur lui… s’tire à l’angalise Du temps qu’on t’arr’couh’su’l’pavé.” (Jean Rictus, Le Coeur populaire, 1900) Duneton also finds an influence of the verb “anglaiser”, meaning in the French slang “to steal”. Therefore se tirer à l’anglaise could be interpreted as “going away as a thief”, not announcing your leaving a certain place, hiding and also trying to conceal your departure. If in French the idiom is related to a bad perception of the English people and of its historical influences upon the French culture and life, the same can be said about the perception of the idiom in English. According to Nigel Reese, “to take French leave means to do something without permission. Originally, to leave a reception without announcing one’s departure. One of many anti-French coinages which exist to snub the French.”9 Pascal Soufflet also notes that to take French leave has two meanings: 1. “to take something without asking leave.” – 2. “to leave a party, slipping away surreptitiously”. Soufflet also pays attention to the double meaning of the term leave = 1. permission, autorisation 2. departure, to take leave of somebody = to leave somebody, to go away.10 Therefore, in both languages the idiom is related to the idea of leaving a place without asking for permission. Note should be made on the fact that the English connotation of the idiom is also related to leaving a party. A o şterge englezeşte is undoubtedly a loan translation from French. The expression has much the same meaning as the locution from French. But this new form of the expression in Romanian does suggest that there has once been another expression which contained the verb a o şterge meaning a pleca pe furiş (to scuttle away) - to leave without announcing your departure. Stelian Dumistrăcel notes in his Dictionary of Romanian Idiomatic Expressions that the locution having this meaning in Romanian would be a o şterge la papuc meaning 1. to leave a place without asking for permission, 2. to leave a party before the ending of it established by the host. There are quite a number of expressions in Romanian related to the connotation of slippers. It is to be reminded here that the appearance of this clothing object in the language is due to the oriental habit of discalceation when visiting somebody. According to this habit, the shoes or slippers of the visitor were left outside, in front of the door, then the visitor had to put them on when leaving the visited place. Therefore, a o şterge la papuc does not only imply the idea of leaving a place in a hurry and not taking permission but also taking one’s slippers when leaving that place. Let us see now if there can be a cognitive model for this idiom. Definitely, the idiom functions, in all three languages, according to the general mapping metaphor LEAVING IS ASKING 7

“From the 15th to the 19th C the term anglais (English) denoted a person in debts, and it was used to hint to the taxes the English had imposed during the 100 years war on the French people.” Apud Duneton, Claude, 1991. La Puce à L’oreille, p.264, Ed. Balland, Paris 8 “Wellington, commanding general of the English army, who had always been defeated by the French generals in Spain, without ever winning any battle, took advantage of the darkness of the night to flee the French anger” apud op. cit. p.264 9 Reese, Nigel 1996. Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, Cassell, London, 10 Soufflet, Pascal, 1997. Expressions et Locutions angalises, Ed. Bordas, Paris.

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PERMISSION. But according to the cultural model and national mentality the metonymy to influence the coming into being of the idiomatic expressions may be THE ENGLISH STAND FOR PERMISSION, THE FRENCH STAND FOR PERMISSION, (ENGLEZII/PAPUCII) / THE ENGLISH / THE SLIPPERS STAND FOR PERMISSION. Thus, any translator trying to find the right equivalent of this idiom in one of the three languages discussed above, should be well aware of the mutual cultural implications and interpenetrations of the three languages. If, to a certain point, the cognitive mechanism may guide the translator to find an equivalent from a source language to a target language, the folk theory or cultural model plays an important part into the process of translation. A good translator is therefore the one that knows the connotative functioning of terms in the target language. Generally speaking, emotion concepts and concepts denoting personal relationships are particularly susceptible of metaphorical understanding. Conceptual metaphors usually function as the connecting element between an abstract domain (such as anger, love, etc) and a more physical domain (which may be fire, for instance). Conceptual metaphors may thus be seen as conceptually motivating the use of words such as spark off, fire, go out, burn the candle, fan the flames, etc in the idioms in which they occur. Conceptual metaphors exist and serve as links between two otherwise independently existing conceptual domains. In this way, by means of the cognitive system of association conceptual metaphors allow us to use terms from one domain to talk about another (for instance leaving / fear / fire to talk about permission / chilliness / anger). The idioms that contain such terms will be about certain target domains as a result of the existence of conceptual metaphors. Our ability to see many idioms as motivated arises from the existence of conceptual metaphors. Thus, the general meaning of many idioms remains completely unmotivated unless we take into account the interplay between meaning and our conceptual system as largely comprised by conceptual metaphors. In other words, the meaning of many idioms depends on and is inseparable from the conceptual system, from the mentality of a people. The meaning of idioms is not independent from the domains of knowledge that make up a large part of our conceptual system and conceptual metaphors provide the link between the special idiomatic meaning and the conceptual knowledge. Therefore, as a conclusion of what we have tried to demonstrate so far, in many cases what determines the general meaning of an idiom (i.e. what concept it has to do with), is the target domain of the conceptual metaphor that is applicable to the idiom at hand and that the more precise meaning of the idiom depends of the particular conceptual mapping that applies to the idiom. For example, the general meaning of the idioms to make one’s flesh creep / to take French leave / spit fire depends on the existence of the conceptual metaphors FEAR IS CHILLINESS / LEAVING IS PERMISSION / ANGER IS FIRE. The more precise meaning of the idiom to spit fire, which is “be very angry”, depends on the conceptual mapping “intensity of fire is intensity of anger” between the source domain fire and the target domain anger. The more precise meanings of the idioms to make one’s flesh creep and to take French leave are “to be frightened” and “ to leave without permission” which depend on the conceptual mapping between the source domain of fear and leaving and the target domains of chilliness and permission. Nevertheless, metaphor is not the only cognitive mechanism that can motivate idioms. In addition to conceptual metaphor we also need conventional knowledge as well as conceptual metonymies to prove that idioms are motivated. Motivation of idioms rarely comes from a single source i.e. from a single cognitive mechanism. In most cases motivation comes from a combination of two or more sources. The particular metonymy that seems to provide motivation for some idiomatic expressions may be SOMETHING STANDS FOR THE ACTIVITY, in our particular case, THE ENGLISH STAND FOR PERMISSION, THE FRENCH STAND FOR PERMISSION, (ENGLEZII/PAPUCII) / THE ENGLISH / THE SLIPPERS STAND FOR PERMISSION or THE SKIN STANDS FOR THE EFFECT/ASPECT.

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By conventional knowledge as a cognitive mechanism is implied the shared information that people in a given culture have concerning a conceptual domain. This shared knowledge includes standard information about parts, shape, size, use and function of a concept, as well as the larger hierarchy of which it forms a part. This conventional knowledge is called by Lakoff (1987) idealized cognitive model, by Holland and Quinn (1987) cultural model or folk theory, or by Fillmore (1982)11 frame or scene. The American psycholinguist Ray Gibbs has found that conceptual metaphors have psychological reality and that they motivate idiomatic expressions. The result shows that people have tacit knowledge of the metaphorical basis for idioms. By conventional knowledge as a cognitive mechanism is implied the shared information that people in a given culture have concerning a conceptual domain. This shared knowledge includes standard information about parts, shape, size, use and function of the human experience, as well as the larger hierarchy of which it forms a part. This conventional knowledge is called by Lakoff idealized cognitive model, by Holland and Quinn cultural model or folk theory, or by Fillmore frame or scene. Considered as part of the conventional knowledge, cultural knowledge – shared presuppositions about the world – plays an enormous role in human understanding, a role that must be recognized and incorporated into any successful theory of the organization of human knowledge. Thus cultural knowledge appears to be organized in sequences of prototypical events – schemas that are called cultural models (i.e. the French = cultural model for the English, the English = cultural model for the French, the slippers = cultural model for the Romanians) and that are themselves hierarchically related to other cultural knowledge. Cultural models are used to perform a variety of different cognitive tasks. Sometimes, these cultural models serve to set goals for action, sometimes to plan the attainment of said goals. Consequently, complexity in the relationship about what people verbalize and what they do and the execution of other, nonverbal activities is inherent in part because speakers so frequently undertake complex tasks with many goals that may or may not include producing a veridical verbal description of what they are about. Cultural models embed a view of “what is” and “what it means” and therefore they grant a seeming necessity to how we ourselves live our lives. Thus ideas gain force because of what people accept as the typical and normal way of life. The idioms presented have shown that chilliness and fear may well be associated with the aspect of goose or hen or creepy skin. The second idiom has proven that for the English it is the French that are snubbed, for the French, the English are to be blamed for all evil doings in their culture, whereas in for Romanians, slippers connote for leaving a place in a hurry and without asking for permission. Thus people find confirmation for their lives in the beliefs and actions of other people; cultural models that have force for individuals are often the historically dominant models of the time. This is so, even though some cultural understandings have certainly undergone historical change and certainly have contemporary competitors in any given historical moment, as is the case of a o şterge la papuc, or faire venir la chair d’oison. . As far as the translation process is involved, we would only like to stick to what translating cultural specific matters may imply, since we have proved that idioms are part and parcel of cultural specific behaviour. Leon Leviţchi (1976) states “everything can be translated but only by implying the greatest efforts ever.” The work of the translator is, therefore, much more difficult than the work of the writer. The writer must be faithful only to himself and to his language system whereas the translator must be faithful to the writer, to the source culture and tradition and to the language in which s/he translates. Ortega Y Gasset12 says “languages separate us not only because they are different, but 11

Fillmore, C. 1982. Towards a Descriptive framework for Spatial Deixis. In Speech, Place and Action, R.J. Jarvella and w. Klein, eds. New York:John Wiley and Sons 12 Ortega Y Gasset 1942. Myseria y esplendor de las traductiones, Madrid, apud Bantaş A. and E. Croitoru.1998. Didactica traducerii, Teora.

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because they originate from different mental systems, from different intellectual systems and last but not least from different philosophies.” In his opinion, translation is a utopia, because it inevitably implies semantic and stylistic losses and sometimes gains. The translator, also called translator operator explores the culture of the target language with the overt purpose of finding the equivalent of what s/he has discovered into the language of the source culture. The translator thus explores the text from the point of view of cultural differences,, cultural models, common cognitive markers, trying to identify the elements specific to the source culture but also the elements which may acquire a great importance when the piece of translation is viewed from the perspective of the target culture. Considered in general as untranslatable or difficult to translate, the stable word joinings (or idioms) owe their existence and circulation to … translations. Florica Dimitrescu states that “idioms and locutions are untranslatable, and this constitutes a common feature of such language matters”. This untranslatability of idioms may be true if we think only of those considered as specific to a certain language and culture. Opposing these are those idioms common to several languages which are part of larger linguistic community. Idioms can be rendered into another language either by means of a word for word translation, or by means of a partial transformation implying a free adaptation of the source text and culture to the target text and culture. The word for word translation is seen as an inferior copy of the original version, which lacks a “vital ingredient” which only the original version possesses. This kind of translation is said to betray the original text. Also called “les belles infidelles”, the result of such a translation is a sort of “notional equivalence”, being accurate but missing the spirit of the source language. The partial transformation of the source language text implies lack of accuracy but also a free adaptation, a rewriting of the original text into another language, which presupposes substituting the original signs with similar signs into the target language. This process preserves the force of the original version but it alters its form and meaning. Translation thus means deconstructing the text at one level, constructing it at another level and this process is so complex as it implies not only knowledge of syntax, semantics, stylistics but also knowledge of general linguistics, comparative and cognitive linguistics. The natural language is, however, polysemantic. There are “good” translations and they are probably the result of a pre-existing notional equivalence, of the so-called common thinking patterns. When translating idioms and metaphors, one has to bear in mind that a culture may be thought of as providing, among other things, a pool of available metaphors for making sense of reality. The translator is thus faced with the difficult problem of rendering into a target language someone else’s experiences when s/he does not live by the same conceptual metaphors and does not have in the target language the equivalent expressions of the communicative situation from the source language. In this situation, exploring the cognitive mechanisms, which motivate idioms in a source language, may significantly help the translator find the closest equivalents in a target language by applying the same method. When talking about the translation of idioms, Dagut’s (1976) classification of metaphors13 points to the passage of metaphor from performance to competence, from individual innovating creation to routine collective repetition. He says that this process can also result in the creation of simplex metaphors, i.e. polysemes or complex metaphors, i.e. idioms. 13

Dagut (1976), distinguishes three main classes of metaphors in terms of their subsequent history. The first include the great majority of metaphors that prove to be ephemeral and disappear without a trace. Cases in point are the forgotten metaphors of literature, journalism and extempore oral invention. The second class is made up of a very large group of metaphors which remain unique semantic creations. Dagut exemplifies this class by embalmed metaphors of literature such as time’s winged chariot and assumes that their endurance is due to their apartness from routine. The third group contains metaphors that are taken up and used by an increasing number of other speakers, so that they gradually lose their uniqueness and peculiarity, becoming part of the established semantic stock of the language and being recorded as such in the dictionary.

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Peter Newmark proposes another classification of metaphors that may help translate them into a target language and also proposes several possibilities of translating metaphor. Some of these principles may be retained as modalities of rendering idioms from one language and culture into another language and culture. The types of metaphor proposed by Newmark (1985, 1988) are dead, cliché, stock, recent, and original. Idioms can best enter the category of stock metaphors or standard metaphors, which are defined as established metaphors which in an informal context are an efficient and concise method of covering a physical and/or mental situation both referentially and pragmatically. (Newmark, 1988)14 Just like idioms, stock metaphors may have cultural, universal and subjective aspects and a certain emotional warmth which is not deadened by overuse. Newmark proposes several procedures for their translation, among which best suiting the category of idioms are: 1. reproducing the same image in the TL, provided it has comparable frequency and currency in the appropriate TL register: e.g. his life hangs on a thread – sa vie ne tient qu’à un fil; a o şterge englezeşte / filer à l’anglaise; a I se face pielea găină / faire venir la chair de poule. Newmark says that this procedure is common especially for one-word metaphors when there is culture overlap and universal experience. 2. replacing the SL image/vehicle with another established TL image if one exists that is equally frequent within the register: e.g. other fish to fry – d’autres chats à fouetter; to take French leave – a o şterge la papuc, to make one’s flesh creep – donner la chair de poule – a i se face pielea găină. Among the other metaphor translation procedures, another method is worth taking into account as far as idiomatic expressions are concerned. It is the reducing of the SL metaphor to sense or literal language: e.g. gagner son pain – earn one’s living – a-şi câştiga pâinea. In principle, the use of this method involves a componential analysis of the sense. Thus, the translator has to pick up those components that fit in the context. In other words, the degree and depth of detail entered into the componential analysis of a stock metaphor depends on the importance the translator gives it in the context. One of the solutions that will do in the case is a synonym: Notre but n’est pas de faire de la Pologne un foyer de conflits – It isn’t our purpose to make Poland into a center (source, focus) of conflict. Another translation procedure that may be used for translating idioms may be the preserving of the same metaphor/idiom combined with sense. This procedure is used when the translator retains the SL image and may wish to ensure that it will be understood be adding a gloss, usually in the form of a footnote. This may happen when the translator lacks confidence in the metaphor’s/idiom’s evocative power and clarity or when the metaphor/idiom is culture-specific and it has an important role in the ST. In case an original cultural metaphor/idiom seems to be a little more obscure and not very important, the translator can sometimes replace it with a descriptive metaphor or reduce it to sense. Nevertheless, care should be taken not to automatically couple the obliteration of a ST metaphor/idiom in one place with the introduction into the TT of another metaphor/idiom elsewhere in such a way as to regard the two as constituting evidence of compensation. Most authors agree that the image in the SL cannot always be retained in the TL (e.g. because the image that is attached to the metaphor/idiom is unknown in the TL, or the associations triggered by the SL metaphor/idiom get lost in the TL), and subsequently several translation procedures have been suggested as alternative solutions to the ideal of reproducing the metaphor/idiom intact. This happens often in a prescriptive sense (i.e. how to translate idioms/metaphors). Three main procedures or strategies can be found in literature: ‰ metaphor/idiom into same metaphor/idiom – direct translation (a case of perfect equivalence); 14

Newmark, P. 1998, Paragraphs on Translation –55. The Linguist 37:94-96

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‰ metaphor/idiom into different metaphor/idiom – substitution of the image in the SL text by a TL metaphor with the same or similar sense and /or same or similar associations; ‰ metaphor/idiom into sense – paraphrase, shift to a non-figurative equivalent. Johnson & Lakoff (1982) suggest that for an accurate or good translation of conceptual metaphors, folk theories of everyday experience should also be taken into account. By folk theory is meant a model of some aspect of reality that is most often taken as constituting common sense and this is the case applied for the idioms taken as examples. Attempting to translate idioms and proverbs has fully proved that where the speaker and the hearer do not immediately share the same sense of reality, the hearer will have to imaginatively restructure his own sense of reality according to the clues provided by the speaker. Metaphorical concepts and folk theories are important guides to this reorganizing activity. It is often possible to get at least a partial grasp of someone else’s understanding even where you do not base your actions on his/her metaphors. This is possible because you have access to those metaphors through your culture’s pool of conventional metaphors and folk theories – assuming that you are both members of the same culture. To sum up, this paper, by investigating what Bally called spontaneous language and defined it as the spring of esthetical resources, (in other words the current every-day language, and not the literary one), has definitely proved that participants in a communicative situation are who and what they are as part of their physical circumstances, their environment, their culture and their heritage. Therefore, for a translator to grasp another’s sense of the reality of things, s/he must find bases in his/her own physical, personal and cultural reality onto which s/he can project the other’s reality in a meaningful way. Bibliography ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ

Avădanei, Constanţa, 2000 Construcţii idiomatice în limbile română şi engleză, Ed. Univ. Al. I.Cuza, Iaşi; Bantaş, A. & Croitoru, E. 1998 Didactica traducerii, Ed. Teora, Bucureşti; Dagut, M. B. 1976. „Can Metaphor Be Translated?” In Babel, 22 (1), p22-23; Dumistrăcel, Stelian, 2001, Dicţionar de expresii româneşti, Institutul European, Iaşi; Duneton, Claude1991, La puce à l’oreille, Eds. Balland, Paris ; Fillmore, C. 1982. Towards a Descriptive framework for Spatial Deixis. In Speech, Place and Action, R.J. Jarvella and w. Klein, eds. New York:Jjohn Wiley and Sons; Gibbs, R. W. And J.O’Brien 1990. Idioms and Mental Imagery: The Metaphorical Motivation for Idiomatic Meaning. In Cognition, No. 36; Holland, D. and D. Skinner 1985. The Meaning of Metaphors in Gender Stereotyping. North Carolina working Papers in Culture and Cognition No.3,. Durham, N.C.: Duke university department of Anthropology; Holland, D. and D. Skinner 1985. The Meaning of Metaphors in Gender Stereotyping. North Carolina Working Papers in Culture and Cognition No.3. Durham,, N.C.: Duke university department of Anthropology; Johnson, M., Lakoff, G. 1982. Metaphor and Communication, L. A. U.T., Trier; Kövecses, Zoltán & Peter Szabo. 1995. A View From Cognitive Semantics In Arbeiten aus dem Forschungskolloquium cognitive linguistik. Seminar für Englische Sprache und Kultur. Universität Hamburg & Department of American Studies Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, No.8; Lakoff, G. and Z. Kövecses, 1989. The Cognitive Model of Anger Inherent in American English In Culrual Models in Language and Thought, Cambridge, CUP; Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1980, Metaphors We Live by. Chicago; University of Chicago Press; Lakoff, George. 1993 The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought. Edited by Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: CUP; Neagu, Mariana (2000) Metaphor in Translation, unprinted course; Newmark, P. 1998, Paragraphs on Translation –55. The Linguist 37: 94-96; Quinn, N. and D. Holland, 1989. Culture and Cognition In Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge, CUP; Reese, Nigel, 1996. Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, Cassell, London; Soufflet, Pascal, 1997. Expressions et locutions anglaises, Ed. Bordas, Paris; The Oxford Companion to the English Language (OUP 1992) ;

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