Foreignization in News Translation: Metaphors in Russian Translation on the News Translation Website InoSMI

Abstract

RÉSUMÉL'emploi métaphorique est récurrent dans les textes à caractère journalistique. Cet article étudie la façon dont les traductions russes de textes originaux traitent les expressions métaphoriques et vise à circonscrire les stratégies traductives utilisées. Dans une première phase a été constitué un double corpus fait de 60 articles originaux écrits en anglais, néerlandais ou finnois accompagnés de leur traduction russe. La comparaison des métaphores identifiées dans les textes sources avec leurs équivalents russes permet ensuite de déterminer dans quelle mesure certaines images acquièrent dans le texte cible un degré d'étrangeté absent dans le texte original. La dernière phase de l'enquête procède à l'analyse des cas exotisants afin de préciser la motivation qui explique le recours à cette stratégie traductive. L'article montre comment, dans un certain nombre de contextes spécifiques, le procédé de l'exotisation garde en effet la trace de points de vue occidentaux sur des sujets concernant la Russie, plus particulièrement lorsque les métaphores des textes sources font affleurer une interprétation critique de la société russe, de la structure de l'Etat ou de ses dirigeants. ABSTRACTJournalistic texts, as a rule, contain a considerable number of metaphorically used expressions. This paper investigates the handling of metaphors in Russian translations of journalistic texts in order to reveal the different translation strategies used by the translators. The research is conducted in three consecutive steps. First, we identify all metaphors in a twofold corpus of 60 original Dutch, English and Finnish newspaper articles on the one hand, and their corresponding 60 translations into Russian on the other. Secondly, we compare the use of metaphors in the translations with their source texts in order to establish the translation strategies and to determine to which extent the metaphorical expressions in the target texts display a higher degree of foreignness than those used in the source texts. Finally, we analyze the cases of foreignization in the target texts in order to find an explanation for the use of this translation strategy. The investigation shows how foreignization is adopted by the translators in a certain number of specific contexts, making the Western discourse on Russian subjects more visible to the reader, especially in these cases where the source text contains metaphors that suggest a critical interpretation of the Russian state, society or the leader of the country. MOTS-CLÉS/KEYWORDStraduction journalistique, métaphore, russe, exotisation, InoSMI. news translation, metaphor, Russian, foreignization, InoSMI. IntroductionThis paper aims to investigate how metaphorically used expressions are translated from Dutch, English and Finnish into Russian. Since metaphors shape an important part of everyday life and are constantly present in our conscience, thought processes and culture, their handling in translation is one of the major translation problems to be studied. Different cultures may, on the one han...

Bibliometric assessment of world scholars’ international publications related to conceptual metaphor

“…The success of the translation largely depends on the handling of the language-specific metaphor expressions. Facing this difficulty, scholars have explored metaphor translation strategies for different genres, such as news ( Van Poucke and Belikova, 2016 ), legal documents ( Bozovic, 2022 ), metaphorical idioms ( Su, 2021 ), etc. However, there is no consensus on the strategies for translating metaphors since different scholars proposed different strategies, such as literal translation, paraphrase, translation by other rhetoric devices, translation by substitution, omission, and combined strategies.…”

Challenges of Measuring Domestication and Foreignization in Translations

“…The variety of keywords indicated above in bold raises two primary questions about measuring the degree of domestication and foreignization in translations: what exactly is measured and how should it be measured? It is clear that the methodology and results of measuring, for example, the degree of linguistic similarity between the source and target texts (as suggested in Van Poucke 2012) would differ greatly from measuring the emotional reactions of readers (if we accept the interpretation of domestication and foreignization proposed in Koskinen 2012).…”

“…In recent years, quantitative measuring of the degree of domestication and foreignization in translations has become a popular topic among both researchers (e.g. Van Poucke 2012;Belikova 2010;Kuusi 2014) and students of Translation Studies (e.g. Vottonen 2014;Laine 2015).…”

“…Being vague and abstract from the very beginning, the concepts of domestication and foreignization have been interpreted very broadly and even in contradictory ways (Paloposki 2011;Koskinen 2012;Van Poucke 2012). Outi Paloposki (2011: 41) rightfully warns that these concepts need to be treated with caution when applied in empirical studies.…”

Scammell, C. (2018). Translation strategies in global news: What Sarkozy said in the suburbs. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 98 pp.

“…She is joined by Bielsa (2016), who advocates global openness in news reporting through foreignizing instead of obscuring differences. Discussions on the use of foreignization in news translation are rising (e.g., Scammell, 2016;Van Poucke & Belikova, 2016).…”