Semantic shift

Trope change

Keep, replace or drop a figure of speech when the target cannot carry it. Also called Figurative change or metaphor and image shift.

Reference/All techniques

Either Phrase Clause Chesterman (1997, S9)

What it is

A trope change is whatever happens to a figure of meaning between one text and the other. Tropes turn on sense rather than on form: metaphor, simile, metonymy, irony. The strategy covers the decision about the figure as a figure, separately from the decision about what it conveys.

Chesterman lists it as S9 and organizes it by outcome in three subclasses. A source trope may be answered by a target trope of the same kind, with the same realization or a different one; by a trope of a different kind; or by no trope at all, the figurative content being carried literally. A fourth possibility, a trope where the source has none, completes the scheme and is where compensation for a figure lost elsewhere usually lands.

Newmark treats the same territory differently, with a ranked series of procedures for metaphor alone: reproduce the image, substitute a standard target image, convert to simile, give simile plus sense, reduce to sense, delete, or combine metaphor with sense. The two accounts overlap without mapping onto each other, since Newmark's list is ordered by preference while S9 classifies outcomes for tropes generally and asserts none. The boundary against scheme change is clean: schemes are patterns of arrangement, tropes are transfers of sense, and a text can keep one while losing the other. Where a figure is fully lexicalized, retrieving the target's fixed counterpart is better described as an established equivalent.

When it applies

  • The source image is dead in its own language and would be live in the target, introducing a figure the source reader never saw.
  • The source domain is culture-bound and unavailable to the target reader.
  • Genre convention limits figurative language, as in technical documentation.
  • Irony depends on a frame the target reader does not share, so the literal surface would be taken at face value.

Examples

DE>EN

  • Source: ein Schuss ins Blaue
  • Target: a shot in the dark
  • Comment: Same trope, near-identical realization: both languages figure a guess as an aimless shot and differ only in what the shot goes into. The work is recognition rather than invention.

NL>EN

  • Source: Dat is een storm in een glas water.
  • Target: That is a storm in a teacup.
  • Comment: The trope holds and the vehicle changes, both figures being equally conventional. Carrying the Dutch glass of water across would produce a fresh image where the source had a worn one, raising the salience of a phrase whose point is that it is unremarkable.

FR>EN

  • Source: Bercy a tranché.
  • Target: The Ministry of Finance has ruled.
  • Comment: A place-name metonymy that assumes the reader knows which building houses which ministry. English press writing has the device but not this instance, so the figure is dropped and the referent named. The cost is real: if the article plays on the building later, that sentence loses its footing.

TR>EN

  • Source: eli açık bir adam
  • Target: a generous man
  • Comment: The Turkish image is conventional and stylistically neutral. English "open-handed" preserves it but is literary and marked, so keeping the figure would raise the register. Dropping to the plain adjective is Chesterman's third subclass, and the right call unless the hand is taken up again nearby.

Watch out for

The characteristic error runs in one direction: translators revive images the source no longer had. A dead metaphor is a word, and rendering its etymology rather than its meaning produces a text that reads as more vivid, and therefore less accurate, than the original. The reviser's question is whether a source-language reader would have noticed the image at all.

  • Decide extended figures at first occurrence. A substitution that works once strands every later sentence depending on the original image.
  • Irony carries stance, which is content. Rendering an ironic clause literally reverses what the speaker is committed to; neutralizing it removes an attitude the reader is entitled to see.
  • In statutes, judgments and contracts a figurative expression is usually deliberate and may itself be the object of interpretation. Retain it and record the difficulty rather than resolving it.

References

  • Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 4. Revised edition (2016), Benjamins Translation Library 123, Ch. 4.
  • Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall, Ch. 10.

Expectations this technique adjusts to

For the entries below the expectation sets a direction and not an endpoint. This technique makes the adjustment, and the entry says what the evidence for the direction is and what that evidence does not establish.

Figurative language restraint

Related entries

Established equivalent Scheme change Paraphrase

Translation that can be checked

Every Translyta delivery comes with a quality report and a terminology report, so the decisions described here are visible to your reviser instead of buried in the text.

Request a quote