Metaphorical conceptualization of beauty in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: translation perspectives

Abstract

In the article, the principles of the conceptual metaphor theory are applied to translation studies. It provides an overview of Lakoff’s classification of conceptual (orientational, ontological, structural) metaphors and Kövecses’s procedures for image metaphor creation (extension, elaboration, questioning, combining) and discusses their application to analyzing the translation of conceptual metaphors dealing with the concept of beauty from English into Ukrainian. Analysis of the metaphorical expressions selected from Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History and its Ukrainian translation led to identify five translation techniques used for the purpose of rendering the metaphoric content between the languages. The study adopts a cognitive linguistic view of translation as a transfer between two conceptual systems through the translator’s cognition with the means of the target language. The paper presents a cognitive linguistic and translation analysis of unique conceptualizations of beauty metaphors compared to the commonly shared view of beauty as something that elicits pleasure.