Cognitive metaphors and the impact on the translation of Nahjul Balagha (case study of the sermon of Jehad in translation of Shahidi and Feyzol-Islam

In this paper, the researchers investigating the conceptual metaphors in the context of Jehad`s sermon between Nahjul Balagha as the source text and two Persian translations of it, from Dr. Mohammad Jafar Shahidi and Ali Naghi Feyzol-Islam as the target texts. They seek to answer the following questions: how cultural differences affect the cultural translation of abstract concepts or conceptual metaphorical meanings? What is the role of translator in translating metaphorical interpretations? Considering what Mandelbit states about the relationship between metaphors and cultural methods, metaphors in context divides into two classes; collective metaphors and creative metaphors and studies it in three levels, conceptual, processive and lingual using the metaphor analysis method. The results reveal that in translating this sermon, translators rarely involved in mistakes and digression of target language, due to the common aspects of Iranian and Arabic culture in the common Islamic cultural domain. In return, both translators in some cases used different explanatory languages in translating common and different metaphor concepts, because of their different translation approaches. It means Dr. Shahidi utilized some cognitive metaphors in translation through a rhetorical and literary approach that not utilized in the source text. Feyzol-Islam also utilized creative metaphors due to the explanatory simplistic approaches of the interpreter.