Translating scientific metaphors in specialised texts : observations from Chinese translations

The fact that metaphor is often a prominent feature of popular scientific texts gives rise to an interesting contradiction between the precision required by science and the fuzziness associated with metaphor. People's enthusiasm for scientific discoveries boosts the popularisation of scientific reports, the process of which is pervasively mediated by translation. Situated within the popular scientific context, this research seeks to understand how metaphors facilitate the process of disseminating scientific theories and how translators tackle the dynamic system of metaphorical expressions in practice. The dataset comprises metaphorical expressions sourced from cosmology articles published in Scientific American between 2017-2018 and in the two official Chinese versions - Huanqiukexue (Beijing) and Kexueren (Taipei). This cluster of examples enables the examination of metaphor translation in systems rather than focusing on isolated metaphorical expressions. Based on the fruitful application of the parametric analysis approach introduced by Shuttleworth (2017), the current research proposes a dual-model parametric approach, which brings Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) into conversation with descriptive translation studies. Facilitated by two metaphor parameters (projection and provenance), this method is proven useful to analyse metaphor translation following the descriptive pathway. The correlations between metaphor types and translation solutions, and the translations of specific metaphorical expressions together with the underlying conceptual metaphors advance the current understanding of metaphor translation and reveal future research potentials.