Hypothesising a systematic approch to L2 translation of conventional metaphor in specialised discourses

The premise of this paper is the pervasiveness of conventional metaphors in the kinds of specialized texts used for training translators to work in their L2. The focus is on this directionality precisely because the difficulty of conventional metaphor identification in the mother tongue is frequently underestimated, despite evidence that it regularly underlies marked lexico-grammatical choices that skew translations. The first part of the study refers to three corpora of different specialized discourses and considers the pedagogic potential of tracing conventional metaphor across discourses. The paper then provides an account of an experimental attempt to use source domains to map conventional linguistic metaphors in three comparable corpora and considers how classifying metaphors in this way can be used to define: a) interlingual convergence and divergence patterns; b) possible translation strategies linked to these patterns: c) the level of L2 translators’ conventional metaphor sensitivity.