Procedures and methods for translating conceptual metaphors from English to Persian: A case study of the Persian translation of Deathstalker 1

Conceptual metaphors are among the distinctive features of the Sci-Fi genre. However, understanding conceptual metaphors and translating them correctly is a big challenge, which can be overcome using appropriate translation procedures and methods. The current study investigated the procedures and methods for translating conceptual metaphors in the Sci-Fi novel Deathstalker 1 from English into Persian. To this end, first, a parallel corpus of 150 English sentences containing conceptual metaphors and their Persian translations was built using stratified random sampling. Then the type of each conceptual metaphor and their cross-domain mappings were determined following Lakoff and Johnson (2003). Finally, the translation procedures and methods applied for translating each conceptual metaphor were identified based on Schmidt’s (2012) translation procedures and Newmark’s (1988) translation methods, respectively. It was found that ‘translating a conceptual metaphor to conceptual metaphor,’ which preserves the type of conceptual metaphor, cross-domain mapping, and meaning, was the most frequent translation procedure (60%). Similarly, literal translation, adding up to 61%, was the most frequently used translation method. The findings suggest that the relative similarity between Persian and English conceptual systems and the conceptual metaphors' universality result in understanding conceptual metaphors and cross-domain mapping between the two languages despite their linguistic differences.