Translation of terminology in journalistic language: mechanic and railway metaphors

Abstract

In this article we research the translation of metaphors in the journalistic language of economics between English and Spanish, focusing on mechanistic and railway metaphors in the context of the economic crisis of 2007. For this purpose, we use the data resulting from exploiting two corpora of our own elaboration. One of them is composed of texts extracted from the newspaper El País, the other of texts from The New York Times, both in their digital versions. To prove our hypothesis, we analyze ten specific cases with the help of terminology cards, in which the Spanish metaphor is displayed next to its English equivalent, followed by the most relevant information about them. In addition to establishing equivalences, we are interested in discovering the semantic relationships existing between these metaphors, especially those of antonymy. This article aims to prove that metaphors are a typical feature of economic language in the media and that these metaphorical expressions have equivalences in other languages, in our case of studying American English. Finally, we hypothesize that mechanistic metaphors, especially those connoting «speed», are somehow related to orientational metaphors and therefore we open a new path for future research.