A Descriptive Study of the Translation of Metaphor from Arabic into English with Reference to Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire and Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses

Metaphors are currently studied within broader models of human cognition and culture. Cognitive theories of metaphor were first developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980 [2003]:4) who viewed metaphor as a property of concepts rather than of mere words. They found metaphor dominant not only in language but also in thought and action. They argue that:
Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.
 
This paper aims at exploring the versatile roles conceptual metaphors play in literary works and their translations. The study relies on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980 [2003]) account of the mapping of conceptual domains and uses Ahren’s (2010) mapping model as well as Mandelblit’s Cognitive Translation Hypothesis (1995) and Van den Broeck’s (1981) approach to literary metaphor translation to attest to the translators’ degree of success in rendering metaphors. Different types of conceptual metaphors in two novels: Palace of Desire for Naguib Mahfouz and Time of White Horses for Ibrahim Nasrallah are being discussed.
 
The analysis of conceptual metaphors in the two novels and their translations shows the cognitive, pragmatic and aesthetic value of these expressions in both the source and target texts. It also proves the translators’ keenness to preserve these images in order to provide the target reader with an authentic feel of the cultural notions involved.