Abstract
Popular science articles are nowadays a key component of the scientific writing landscape: science is popularised through a recontextualization of a primary scientific discourse to fit the knowledge and expectations of a broader audience, but then disseminated further through translation. This recontextualization is often achieved using metaphors to help the non-expert reader to access complex and abstract scientific concepts based on shared author-reader experiences, which are, however, not necessarily shared with the new target-culture audience, potentially endangering cross-linguistic communication of the scientific content. This thesis aims to investigate metaphors in American popular science articles dealing with astronomy and astrophysics published in Scientific American and their Arabic translations published in Majallat-Al-Oloom. The thesis focuses more particularly on metaphors fulfilling a pedagogical role which are embedded in culture specific domains. Although English is argued to be the global lingual franca of the sciences nowadays, the use of culture specific metaphors might raise difficulties in disseminating the scientific content in English and in its translations. The field of astronomy and astrophysics has been chosen because of the complex and often abstract nature of its concepts that requires an appropriate discourse strategy to bring abstract concepts closer to the general reader’s understanding. It is also a domain that is visible in the public understanding of the sciences through its large diffusion. In this scientific communication metaphor fulfils not only a terminological function but is also used as a pedagogical tool to achieve popularisation. Despite its role in disseminating scientific content, metaphor in the discourse of astronomy and astrophysics has remained so far unexplored from both metaphor studies and translation perspectives. To achieve these aims, a multidimensional framework combining a conceptual approach with linguistic and functional elements was devised to capture the complexity of metaphor from a translation perspective, especially between languages of differing diffusion where English is a global lingua franca. A bilingual corpus was compiled (circa 150,000 words) and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The updated version of the metaphor identification procedure (MIPVU) was further adapted to allow the identification of the linguistic metaphors and their functions. The methodology also accounted for how the conceptual metaphors are implied from the linguistic data, a step that is often unaccounted for in the literature. The study shows that linguistic metaphors used in the source texts fulfil mainly a pedagogical function and are often embedded in culture-specific domains, presenting challenges for translation. A wide range of strategies was identified in the translation of these metaphors, where the same conceptual metaphor is often reproduced in the target text by combining many strategies (couplets). This results in new metaphors in the target system that are argued to achieve a dual purpose: they facilitate access to scientific concepts communicated in the source text by unpacking the metaphorical images for a new audience; and they contribute to the enrichment of the target-language system.