The republic of uzbekistan

Problem 3. Cohesion and coherence
So far, we were only looking at metaphors in isolation. But they (as any expression) are always a part of a larger text and context. And the text has to hang together (cohesion) and make sense in context (coherence). This is why it is often more difficult to translate shorter texts than entire volumes. When somebody asks me to translate something, I always want to know the whole sentence Texts have to be cohesive locally as well as globally. They have to make sense and their different parts have to connect to each other. Otherwise, they would just be lists. This connective tissue of text is built up from different types of constructions. For example, there are connectives like ‘thus’, ‘but’, ‘however’ that establish causal or other logical relationships between parts of the text. But the most important is anaphora which is used to point back (and sometimes forward) in the text to establish a relationship between different parts. This can be done in all sorts of ways. Pronouns as in “Aisha went into battle. She won. Her soldiers revered her.” But often this is just done by repetition (which is often alternates with pronouns).
So the next sentence in the previous example may go like this: “And Aisha deserved their respect, because she took good care of her soldiers. Cohesion is not the same in all languages or genres. Sometimes, repetition is avoided or even forbidden, sometimes it is encouraged or required, some languages require more specific causal signalling than others. In other words, we see echoes of the problems of conventionality and underdetermination raising their meaning. But if that were all, cohesion would not require a special mention. The problem for the translator and particularly the translator dealing with metaphor is that cohesion is not always very straightforwardly textual. It relies not just on what was said but also on what else is known.
This is particularly the case with so called ‘anaphoric islands’. They are a sort of metonymic phenomenon. For example, ‘I speak Russian, but I’ve never been there’. ‘There’ refers to ‘Russia’ which was never mentioned but is metonymically linked to the language of ‘Russian’. This example itself would not cause a problem for the translator. But when the metonymy becomes enmeshed with metaphor, it often is. Because we can now link together not just things from one domain but from two .For example, take he band exploded onto the scene, an‘ the reverberations are still being felt today.” Here the author is taking the domain of explosions in the initial conventional metaphor and draws on it some more by taking other images from what happens after the explosion. But the translator may not have been able to translate the initial idiom using the same domain in explosion. For example, in Czech you can only use the word for ‘explode’ mean the equivalent of the English ‘bomb on stage’. So, the domain of explosions was never activated and reverberations would make no sense. This sort of thing is not that difficult to overcome within a single sentence but sometimes the entire text is built around a metaphor that only shares some of the domain across languages. So the translator may have to leave things out or try to make up a completely different metaphor and hope it will not distort the meaning of the original too much. Journalistic and academic texts are often full of these structuring metaphors and it is almost impossible to keep up with them throughout the text. Notice how the subtle grammatical difference makes all the difference between metaphor and literal language. ‘Exploded onto the scene’ is very different from ‘exploded on the scene’.
There are many and 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 get by.