THE MACHINE METAPHOR IN TRANSLATION FROM ENGLISH TO SERBIAN

Abstract

This study explores the machine metaphors in English to Serbian translation of scientific writing. It has already been demonstrated that the metaphors based on the source domain of machines structure identical target domains in English and Serbian producing a strikingly similar set of correspondences. However, the translatability of metaphors based on the source domain of machines has not been examined so far. Consequently, the aim of this study is to explore the amount of overlap between English and Serbian when it comes to translation of machine-based conceptual mappings in scientific writing. The analysis was conducted on the corpus of several hundred examples of metaphorical conceptualizations based on this source domain in English and their counterparts in Serbian translation. The illustrations extracted from the corpus were grouped according to whether the source language (English) metaphors were: a) retained; b) removed; c) entirely eliminated, or c) added in the target text (Serbian). The results show that machine metaphors are remarkably stable in translation, and that even when translation modifications are introduced, they are mainly limited to the selection of a different representative within the same source domain.