Translating Metaphors Of Cameroonian Proverbs From French Into English

Proverbs are found in historical writings,everywhere on the globe,and are right up till today employed,embellishing our languages with their figurative phrasing and communicating essential values in our various cultures.In the African society of which Cameroon(a country located in Central Africa)is part,proverbs are important elements of the language,constituted mainly of symbolic and metaphorical language.Many Cameroonian proverbs contain metaphors that are sometimes employed as part of a training technique to upgrade abstract thoughts’ conceptualization.Translation is a critical task that plays an essential role in exchanging information,news,and culture between people around the world.Therefore,the translation of metaphors,in this case,the metaphors found in the Cameroonian proverbs,is an important and daunting task that requires the translator’s bilingual ability in the source and the target languages and a comprehensive understanding of both cultures.In Cameroon’s literature,there are very few or nearly no studies that deal with the translation of metaphors,especially metaphors in Cameroonian proverbs.Moreover,no researcher has endeavored to identify the types of metaphors contained in Cameroonian proverbs.To bridge this gap in the literature,the present research formulates the following questions:(1)What are the types of metaphors found in the Cameroonian proverbs?(2)What strategies are used to translate(from French into English)the metaphors found in the Cameroonian proverbs?(3)What is the distribution of the translation strategies in the different target texts(TTs)?(4)What are the reasons motivating the choice of the strategies used? In our attempt to provide answers to these questions,we carried out a mixed-method research.Qualitative research is used to answer the first research question and a part of the second research question.To answer the first research question,we used the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit(MIPVU)(Steen et al,2010:25-6)to identify linguistic metaphors and Steen’s(1999,2011)Five-step method to identify conceptual metaphors and analyze their metaphoric mappings.The corpus used for the metaphor identification is a set of 175 proverbs selected from books and online repertoires of African and Cameroonian figurative expressions.Only structural and ontological metaphors were identified in the corpus of proverbs.No orientational metaphor was identified in the corpus.This does not mean there are no orientational metaphors in French or that Cameroonians do not conceptualize experiences in terms of spatial orientation.This could be explained by the fact that Cameroonian proverbs are rarely conceptualized in terms of spatial orientation,but rather in terms of tangible things or situations Cameroonians live,as we saw in structural and ontological metaphors.Structural metaphors consist of metaphors such as animal metaphors,plant metaphors,body parts metaphors,and other types of metaphors.These various structural and ontological metaphors found in Cameroonian proverbs consist of conceptual metaphors such as PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS,PEOPLE ARE PLANTS,REWARDS ARE PLANTS,SITUATIONS ARE NATURAL PHENOMENA,HUMAN SPEECH IS A HURTFUL OBJECT,RESULTS ARE PLANTS,VALUABLE PEOPLE ARE BODY PARTS,etc.To answer the rest of the questions,we designed two translation tests for professional translators.The translation tests consist of thirty proverbs each selected from our proverbs’ corpus.A total of fourteen professional translators took the test,and the results were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively.The results have shown that there are five strategies used in the TTs,namely:(1)Keeping the same conceptual metaphor(henceforth CM)in the source and target texts;(2)using a different CM with a similar meaning;(3)further elaboration of the CM;(4)using different CM,with another meaning;(5)using non-metaphoric expression.We used Microsoft Excel,to draw tables and pie charts showing the distribution of the translation strategies in each of the TTs.We discovered that the distributions of translation strategies vary from one TT to another.Behind the choice of the strategies,there are:(1)linguistic motivations,(2)cultural motivations,and(3)cognitive motivations.The findings of this research will help translators and translation teachers,to identify metaphors and their metaphorical mapping to have the best understanding of metaphors,and choose the appropriate strategy for their translation.The translation curriculum planners/developers may use the findings of the present research to develop a metaphor translation course independently from the literary or linguistic translation.Metaphor translation can be studied in the same way legal translation,economic translation,and audiovisual translation are studied in translation schools,because metaphor has the particularity to appear in all of these domains of translation.