What it is
Genres differ in how much figure they will carry. A circular, a judgment, a prospectus and a press release each admit a different quantity of metaphor, personification and idiom, and a text that exceeds its genre's ration reads as out of place before it reads as wrong.
The system permits figure everywhere. Every language here can personify an institution or describe a market as overheating, and nothing grammatical distinguishes those from their literal paraphrases. What varies is the tolerance a readership brings to a text type, and that tolerance is written down by nobody.
The boundary against the technique is worth stating plainly. trope-change owns the operation on the image; this record owns the norm that calls for it and the community that holds it. Whether the image is marked as foreign or as offered non-literally belongs to italics and foreign wording.
Where the expectation comes from
The result of looking is negative, and the negative is the finding. Four instruments were opened along four routes, each the one most likely in its own community to carry a rule about imagery, and none rules figurative language.
- Aanwijzing 3.3 of the Dutch Aanwijzingen voor de regelgeving, headed Duidelijkheid, has two numbered rules: "Het normale spraakgebruik wordt zoveel mogelijk gevolgd" and "Woorden waarvan de betekenis te weinig bepaald of onduidelijk is, worden niet gebruikt". Ordinary usage and determinate meaning, and no mention of figure.
- Madde 25 of the Turkish Mevzuat Hazırlama Usul ve Esasları Hakkında Yönetmelik requires that "Taslaklarda sade, açık ve anlaşılır bir dil kullanılır", plain, clear and comprehensible. Its other paragraphs rule spelling authority and abbreviations. Figure is not addressed.
- Clear English: Tips for Translators carries nineteen tips in three sections, on concision, on syntax and on grammatical difference between languages. Not one concerns metaphor, imagery, idiom or simile.
- The one opened rule touching expressive language is English Style Guide 1.1, which tells its authors to avoid very colloquial Irish or British usage where the readership includes non-native speakers. Colloquialism is not figure.
Nothing here can be Codified or House, because there is nothing for either tier to attach to. A text carrying more imagery than its genre tolerates reads as inappropriate to a competent reader and breaches no written rule, which is the Expectancy tier stated exactly.
Two limits on that negative. Silence is evidence only where the text was reachable: the English Style Guide's chapter 12 on legal language lies beyond its file's extraction limit and nothing is claimed about it, and the German Handbuch der Rechtsförmlichkeit was reached only at its contents. And the scholarly side is thin. Zibin and Solopova (2024) introduce a special issue and present no data of their own; what they establish is that metaphor varies across languages and cultures despite a common embodied basis, feelings being seated in the heart in most languages and in the liver in Malay. No study measuring figurative density in a source and its translations was opened, so nothing here says translators in fact reduce figure.
Consequences for translation
A negative finding removes an argument a reviser might have expected to have.
- The instruction to write plainly is not an instruction about images. A drafting rule requiring ordinary usage is satisfied by a metaphor that is ordinary usage, and a reviser citing such a rule against an image has cited the wrong thing.
- Nothing here is mechanically checkable and nothing here is a defect. The objection is wrong density for the genre, weighed and reported as a preference.
- Density is a property of the whole text. Replacing one image is local; the norm is about how many survive, so the count is taken at document level or not at all.
- Where a source image has no target counterpart, unpacking and substitution are both legitimate, and no instrument reaches far enough to prefer either.
Examples
NL>EN
- Source: Het normale spraakgebruik wordt zoveel mogelijk gevolgd.
- Target: Ordinary usage is to be followed as far as possible.
- Comment: Aanwijzing 3.3, binding on those who prepare and adopt Dutch regulations. It is the nearest thing a Dutch drafter has to a rule about wording and it rules the register rather than the image. A translator reading it as forbidding metaphor would be reading in a prohibition nobody wrote.
TR>EN
- Source: Taslaklarda sade, açık ve anlaşılır bir dil kullanılır.
- Target: Drafts are to use plain, clear and comprehensible language.
- Comment: Madde 25 of the yönetmelik in force since 2022, binding on Turkish legislative drafting and on no text in another language. Three adjectives about clarity and none about figure: the same shape as the Dutch rule, reached independently, which is why this tier rests on what was not found.
References
- Aanwijzingen voor de regelgeving, consolidated to the eleventh amendment, Stcrt. 2022, 5649. Aanwijzing 3.3 (Duidelijkheid), read on its own page at the Kenniscentrum voor beleid en regelgeving.
- Mevzuat Hazırlama Usul ve Esasları Hakkında Yönetmelik, put into force by Cumhurbaşkanı Kararı 5210 of 23 February 2022, Resmî Gazete of 24 February 2022, sayı 31760. Madde 25 (Taslaklarda kullanılacak dil), consolidated text on the legislation portal of the Cumhurbaşkanlığı.
- Clear English: Tips for Translators. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, 2014, edited by Selim Earls. Nineteen tips in sections A to C.
- English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 21 November 2025. Section 1.1 (Language usage). Chapter 12 (Legal language) lies beyond the file's extraction limit and is not relied on in either direction.
- Zibin, Aseel and Olga A. Solopova. "Metaphors across languages, cultures and discourses: A research agenda", Russian Journal of Linguistics 28(1), 2024, pages 7 to 32, DOI 10.22363/2687-0088-37837. Open access. An introduction to a special issue; what is taken from it is a synthesis and not a finding.