La metáfora y su traducción del inglés al árabe: estudio terminológico en el dominio del cambio climático

Abstract

This thesis focuses on metaphor-based neologisms in the domain of climate change in the English language, and their transfer into Arabic. It also studies the dimension of domain gain and loss associated with the transfer processes of such neologisms at both the conceptual and cognitive levels. Metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in scientific discourse, and it has been widely studied from different aspects; however, further research is still required to achieve more advances from a cognitive and conceptual perspective at cross-linguistic level. This includes the study of frames activated by metaphor-based terms and their adequacy for the communication of scientific facts. At the same time, taking into consideration that English is the lingua franca in science and technology, it is important to study the influence of English in the conceptual construction of domains in other languages. In this research, we aim at filling this gap by providing the results of three corpus-based case studies in the domain of climate change. Our specific objectives are the following: (i) to study metaphor-based neologisms and address their characteristics in specialised discourse; (ii) to explore metaphor-based neologisms in the domain of climate change by analysing their conceptual and lexical profile in English and Arabic, in accordance with the environmental event representation method adapted for the creation of the terminological knowledge base EcoLexicon; (iii) to study their conceptual construction and metaphoric mapping; (iv) to investigate the influence of cross-linguistic transfer of the terms from English into Arabic in domain loss and gain; (v) to propose Frame-Based Terminology (FBT) and frame-based translation as a systematic method for the transfer of neologisms from English into other languages. Guided by the premises of FBT (Faber Benítez et al., 2005, 2006; Faber Benítez, 2012) we compiled comparable and parallel corpora on climate change in English and Arabic. We also used the open corpus of EcoLexicon and the United Nations (UN) corpus in Sketch Engine. These corpora were used for the extraction of metaphor-based terms in English, for the study of conceptual and lexical profiles of each term, and for the identification of equivalent terms in Arabic. Our study focused on three terms: radiative forcing, coral bleaching and carbon capture and sequestration. The analysis evealed that those terms are based on the metaphoric parallelism with the frames of tug of war, textile bleaching, and police seizure respectively. It also showed that the transfer processes of those neologisms into Arabic were based on literal translation and calques. In some cases, the result of the transfer processes led to domain gain, as is the case of the terms ‘القسر اإلشعاعي’ [alqasr alish’ā’y] [radiative forcing], ‘تبييض المرجان’ [tabyyīḍ almarjān] [coral bleaching] and ‘حجز/ احتجاز الكربون’ [ḥajz / iḥtijāz alkarbwn] [carbon capture]. However, it also led to terminological fuzziness and domain loss in other cases, due to the lack of systematicity in the coinage of neologisms, since the frame elements activated by the original terms in English were not properly analysed before coining some of the alternative terms, such as ‘ابيضاض المرجان’ [ībyīḍāḍ alamrjan] [coral bleaching]. The implemented methodology is proposed for the systematic transfer of terms from one language to another, in a way that guarantees the coherence of the conceptual systems underlying the terms.