| Keywords [eng] |
Conceptual Metaphor Theory, TED Talks, popular legal discourse, legal metaphors, metaphor translation, English-Spanish translation, konceptualiosios metaforos teorija, TED konferencijų pranešimai, populiarusis teisės diskursas, teisės metaforos, metaforų vertimas, vertimas iš anglų kalbos į ispanų kalbą |
| Abstract [eng] |
Legal discourse can be complicated for non-specialists, as it relies on specific terminology, archaic expressions, syntactically complex sentences and legal concepts that require specialized legal knowledge. For this reason, legal discourse, aimed at general public, has to adapt legal language, make it accessible and transform complicated legal ideas into comprehensible concepts. In this sense, metaphor becomes an essential component for understanding and legal reasoning. Therefore, the object of this thesis is the metaphors used in English TED Talks and the translation strategies applied when rendering them into Spanish language. The aim of the research is to identify legal metaphors in English TED Talks, classify them into metaphor categories and analyze how they are translated into Spanish. The following objectives were formulated to achieve this aim: 1. To identify legal metaphors in English TED Talks and classify them into metaphor categories. 2. To analyze how these metaphors are translated into Spanish across all metaphor categories. 3. To categorize and discuss the translation strategies applied in the transfer of legal metaphors from English into Spanish. The thesis begins with an introduction that defines the research object, aim, objectives and research questions, followed by a review of relevant theoretical literature. The methodological section presents the corpus, metaphor identification procedure and classification of translation strategies. The empirical part presents and discusses the findings. Finally, the conclusions of the research are provided, followed by references, summaries and an appendix. The analysis is based on a parallel English-Spanish corpus of 20 English TED Talks on legal issues and their official Spanish subtitle translations. By applying the MIP/VU procedure, 429 metaphorical expressions were identified in the English source texts, after which they were assigned conceptual metaphor labels based on Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and grouped into ten metaphor categories. The most frequent category was Conflict, power & constraint, with 79 conceptual metaphors, indicating that legal issues are often conceptualized through struggle, control, pressure, restriction and opposition. It was followed by Objects, materials & tools (70), where legal concepts are described as things that can be used, held, shaped or removed, and Space, boundaries & structure (67), where abstract legal notions are understood through spatial and structural imagery. The Spanish translations of the metaphors were analyzed following Schäffner’s cognitive approach to metaphor translation. The results indicate a clear tendency toward metaphor preservation: 306 cases (71.3%) were translated as Metaphor → same metaphor, while Metaphor → sense occurred in 71 cases (16.6%), Metaphor → different metaphor in 51 cases (11.9%) and Metaphor → deletion appeared only once (0.2%). The results show that metaphors related to social relations, perception and conflict were most often preserved; however, metaphors related to language, objects and machines were frequently neutralized or shifted conceptually. Therefore, legal metaphors in English TED Talks are generally transferable into Spanish, although some domains show a stronger tendency toward neutralization or conceptual shift, while deletion is almost absent. |
