metaphor translation

["Steven M. Belknap" <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>]

mi cusku dihe
>> .i ti dargu la bebylan
>

la dn cusku dihe
>.i ti ba'e tadji la bebylan. .ini'ibo noda litru ra .iji'a malgli
>

.i la krys cu tadji ku ba'e dargu la bebylan


"Road to Babylon" is a literary reference type metaphor, which assumes that
the speaker and listener have a common biblical referent. Babylon was an
actual city, and actual roads led to it. <litru> is more general than
<dargu> and <tadji> is more general than <litru>. <Dargu> seems like the
best fit when translating the idea of a "road"; <klaji> for example would
not be right, because it does not carry the sense of "road-route". Using
<tadji> as you propose obscures the metaphor.

I would think a legitimate means of translating a metaphor would be to form
an image in the listener's mind of the concrete meaning of the metaphor,
then let the listener go through the "Aha!" response, as he/she remembers
the city of Babylon, and the story about the fragmentation of language, and
then sees the analogy to Chris's proposal. (My wife is a native Cuban and
we have found that this approach seems to work for English-Spanish
translation of many literary reference type metaphors, but of course gives
weirdness with other types of metaphors.)

I tried to find a cmavo or a gismu for "metaphor" but came up empty. Is
there a way I can say the concrete meaning of my metaphor flagging it as a
metaphor so as to induce the "aha!"? Is there a way to distinguish which
type of metaphor is being used?

cohomihe la stivn


Steven M. Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria

email: sbelknap@uic.edu
Voice: 309/671-3403
Fax:   309/671-8413