The republic of uzbekistan

1.2 Analyzing metaphor use in the target language and source language
Metaphors work best when they connect abstract concepts to something common that readers already understand well. For example, in the Einstein quote above, abstract disciplines are described as a tangible object in nature to show how they relate to one another Metaphor seems like it should be very difficult to translate.
But I’d like to argue that what is difficult about translating it is not the metaphor part but rather how it is used. This makes it no different from any other aspect of language. But because it is a rather salient use of language, we can use it to illustrate these general problems of translation.
I have summarised these into three broad classes of problems that a translator has to deal with day in and day out.

1. 
   Idiomaticity and conventionality
   
2. 
   Knowledge underdetermination
   
3. 
   Coherence and cohesion
   

Problem 1. Idiomaticity and conventionality
The fundamental problem for all translation is that actual language use is a not a matter of just combining words according to some rules of grammar. There is a whole other set of conventions about when and how to use certain words and rules. Sometimes, this is a matter of propriety. So you have to know, not to call your teacher ‘dude’ as a matter of social convention. But most often the convention means that certain words used together, the whole has a different meaning than it would if we just combined the meanings of the individual words.
Translation is hard. And it is impossible if we expect perfect translation that goes both ways. If we imagine that a hypothetical perfect translator translates a text from L1 to L2, we would expect another hypothetical perfect translator to be able to take that text in L2 and translate it back to L1 and the we could get the exact same result as the original. That is only possible on the simplest of texts. But if we went back and forth a lot, threw in some other languages into the mix, we would be fairly far from the original.
All the different problems of conventionality, underdetermination and cohesion would compound so that we would see a very different text. But at the same time, it is not that hard. Because we could probably by and large keep the basics together. As we know, the Bible is a translation of a translation and it’s not all that different across languages. But it did take teams of careful translators with deep knowledge of the original and its context years or even decades to complete. Which is in great contrast to most of the translation done by hurried, underpaid and often underinformed translators.Language is so redundant that bad translations make less difference than one might think. It is remarkable how many mistranslations there are in subtitles or dubbings of popular TV shows and people still love them. I’m sure there are legal documents, psychological texts and more that also contain mistranslations. Sometimes they can be consequential but often they’re not.
My favourite childhood book was the The Coot Club by Arthur Ransome. In it, some children are learning to sail and they are spending a lot of time naming the sides of the boat. These are ‘port’ and ‘starboard’ in English and they are notoriously difficult to learn. But in Czech they are simply left side (levobok) and right side (pravobok). Children often confuse left and right, so it makes sense that they would make some errors. But I still remember thinking as a child that these kids were particularly dimwitted. Furthermore, two characters (twins) had nicknames ‘Port’ and ‘Starboard’ which was simply rendered into Czech as ‘Lefty’ and ‘Righty’ and it was never connected with the nautical term. There is nothing the translator could have done to rescue all the internal connections and cultural allusions in the text. And still I liked the books so much that I actually moved to Norfolk where the action took place.There are many many more sub-categories of problems that translators have to deal with. But most of them could be thought through the lens of one of the three I mentioned. Translating figurative languages is hard but only because translation is hard. It is impossible to convey every little nuance, turn of phrase, hint and allusion without a lot of footnotes. Fiction is harder to translate than non-fiction, short pithy phrases are harder to translate than sprawling texts. Translation is hard. Metaphors are hard. But we still Most of any language depends on this kind of convention. And most of the metaphors people deal with in translation are also to some extent conventional. So, if I say ‘don’t eat like a pig’ in English, I mean don’t eat so much. In Czech, it means ‘don’t eat messily’. We have the domain of humans eating and pigs eating. That comes with certain imagery of what it looks like and what happens during, before and after.But when we use a metaphor, we are choosing what parts of the domains to project onto one another. And with metaphors that have been conventionalised, different languages and cultures choose different things.This means that very novel and flashy metaphors and similes are often the easiest to translate. I still remember reading “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” in the Czech translation of a Raymond Chandler novel. And it was very easy for me to google the original now. Because the sort of conceptual work Chandler is doing here is completely original and yet entirely understandable. This might be more difficult if translating into a language that does not have concepts for tarantula or angel food cake but it would be trivial to come up with a combination that does an equivalent job. These are called idioms. Often, colourful expressions like ‘kick the bucket’ or ‘the whole nine yards’ are given as examples. But these are easy. The problem is that language is idiomatic all the way down.
The words ‘put’ and ‘up’ have certain meanings but there’s no way you can figure out the meaning of ‘I will not put up with you’ or ‘I will put you up with Jane’ without knowing the convention behind them or at least getting enough context.But because of their conventionality, idioms pose a core problem for the translator, namely picking an equivalent level of conventionality or idiomaticity. I still remember reading in a Western adventure book in my youth a lumberjack calling somebody what to me sounded like a novel curse ‘You god forsaken son of a female dog.’ (That made it sound like the character was trying to evoke rich imagery through linguistic innovation but I’m pretty sure the original simply had
‘You damn son of a bitch’. The translator simply kept the imagery of the original but did not take into account that it would sound novel to a Czech reader whereas it was entirely conventional in English. Conventionality can also fly under the radar, blurring the lines between grammar and usage. For instance, ‘a bird singing in the tree’ will be translated as ‘on the tree’ into Czech. English conceptualises the tree as a container whereas Czech as a surface. In Czech, ‘in the tree’ would mean inside the trunk. Both languages have the same conceptual distinction between ‘in’ and ‘on’ but by convention they apply it differently to birds and trees. Equally, an English speaker introducing themselves on the phone will say ‘This is Hana’ but a
Czech speaker will say ‘Here is Hana’. Both languages focus on the difference in perspective and distance but one will point at the person and the other at the location. These two examples are not ‘figurative’ in the rhetorical sense but they are conceptual. However, the way they conceptualise the world is a matter of convention, not pure grammar and lexicon.