Translating metaphors presents one of the most theoretically complex challenges in the field of translation studies, requiring translators to balance semantic fidelity, cultural equivalence, and pragmatic effect in ways that often demand creative judgment rather than systematic rule application. Newmark (1981; 1988) believed that choosing from among the strategies to translate metaphors is strongly contingent upon their types. Therefore, he taxonomized different types of metaphors on the basis of their originality and boldness. According to Newmark (1988) metaphors can be grouped under six heads; namely, dead, cliché, standard or stock, adapted, recent and original. What comes below is an explanation about his taxonomy as well as a quick view on his suggested strategies to translate each type of metaphor. Newmark’s framework continues to be widely cited in translation pedagogy precisely because it provides trainee translators with a practical decision-tree that moves from the recognition of metaphor type to the selection of a contextually appropriate rendering strategy (Munday, 2016).
Dead metaphor is the one whose image is forgotten through heavy use. A great number of ordinary vocabulary in any language are dead metaphors. Words such as mouth, circle, drop, fall, rise, arm, space, field, line top, bottom and foot are actually among the dead metaphors of the English language. The word ‘foot’ in ‘at the foot of the hill’ is a dead metaphor. Metaphors of this type can be classified into three groups. The first group includes the ones which provoke the metaphoric image in mind to some extent (e.g. ‘reflect’ as ‘think’). The second group includes metonyms (e.g. ‘worm’ as ‘screw’ and ‘crown’ as ‘kingdom’). And finally, the third group includes the non-technical words (e.g. mouth and foot) which can change to a translation crisis point when applying in combination with other words. For example:
It is out of my depth.
the arm of the chair
square the circle
It is a matter of life and death.
He is a cornerstone of the team.
Cliché metaphor is a metaphor that has lost its original imaginative power through overuse in writing and has become a common expression. A cliché metaphor is a kind of metaphor that has become an idiom or collocation. In everyday speech, speakers frequently deploy clichéd expressions precisely because their opacity has diminished; the listener processes the idiom as a lexical unit rather than reconstructing the underlying image, which is what makes them communicatively efficient but stylistically inert (Steen et al., 2010). For example:
to leave no stone unturned (an expression meaning to try every possible way to do something)
to take the bull by the horns (an expression meaning to deal with something boldly)
to see the light at the end of the tunnel
Standard or stock metaphors are defined as an established metaphor that is an effective and non-emotive means of covering a concept that has no simple equivalent in language. They cover the social as well as any other aspect of life in a way that non-metaphorical language cannot. Stock metaphors are distinguished from clichéd metaphors by their continued semantic transparency; the reader still perceives a meaningful mapping between source and target domains, even if the expression itself has become conventional. For example:
La crise cardiaque (French) – The heart attack, in English
The sun is setting.
The law has long arms.
Adapted metaphors are those metaphors which some writer or speaker has adapted the conventional metaphor or mixed two or more conventional metaphors to create a new effect. This adaptation often serves a rhetorical purpose, either to defamiliarize a concept the reader has become accustomed to thinking about in a fixed way or to produce an ironized or satirical variant of a well-known expression. For example:
‘he had to leave no stone unturned in his effort to go to the conference.’ (the cliché ‘leave no stone unturned’ has been adapted and added to).
Recent metaphors are those metaphors, which have just appeared in the everyday language of the source language. These neologisms tend to emerge most rapidly in domains characterized by rapid change, such as technology, politics, and social media, where new concepts outpace available literal vocabulary and speakers reach for figurative language to fill the gap. For instance, ‘to be online’ in digital language. Recent metaphors present particular difficulty for translators because target-language equivalents may not yet exist, requiring the translator to either borrow the source-language form, create a calque, or find an entirely new figurative expression that captures the same pragmatic meaning in the target culture (Munday, 2016).
Original or innovative metaphors are one-off creations, which create a special effect (generally on a single occasion but may be repeated afterwards). These are the creations of an individual mind in a particular rhetorical context, designed to produce a striking effect through the surprise of an unexpected conceptual mapping. For instance:
‘… my love is like a red, red rose’ (by Robert Burns)
‘… the world is a stage’ (by William Shakespeare)
As for Newmark’s strategies to translate metaphors, there are seven strategies. The first one is reproducing the same image in the translation. In this strategy, the translator keeps the SL image in the TL, the translator must check to see whether the image has a similar frequency and currency in the TL and whether it carries similar connotations in the TL. For example: ‘I can’t make head or tail of this’ and ‘Je ne comprends pas/saisie pas’ in French. The second strategy is replacing the image in the SL with a standard TL image which does not clash with the TL culture. For example: ‘The die is cast’ may become ‘the cards are on the table’ in French. The third strategy is translation of metaphor by simile, retaining the image. For example: ‘he is a lion’ and ‘he is like a lion’ in French. The fourth strategy is translation of the metaphor (or simile) by simile plus sense (or occasionally metaphor plus sense). This often has the advantage of combining communicative and semantic translation. For example: ‘he lost his head’ and ‘he was so confused that he lost his head’ in French.
The fifth strategy is conversion of metaphor to sense. This strategy is used for standard SL metaphors when TL culture appears unfamiliar with the image. For example: ‘to take the bull by the horns’ can simply be translated as ‘tackle the problem boldly.’ The sixth strategy is deletion. This strategy is used only if the metaphor is redundant in the context; the translator simply deletes the metaphor. The seventh strategy is using a same metaphor combined with sense. This strategy is used to ensure the meaning is clear to the TL reader. Steen et al. (2010), drawing on corpus linguistic methods from the MIP/MIPVU framework, have provided empirical evidence that metaphor density in academic and journalistic texts is considerably higher than intuitive reading might suggest, which reinforces the practical importance of systematic metaphor recognition training for professional translators.
Newmark’s taxonomy, while foundational, has been challenged and refined by subsequent translation scholars who argue that the boundary between metaphor types is frequently blurred in authentic texts, particularly in literary and journalistic genres where writers deliberately oscillate between conventional and innovative figurative language to achieve specific stylistic effects (Munday, 2016). Corpus-assisted approaches to metaphor translation have revealed that translator decisions about equivalence often depend as much on genre conventions, target audience expectations, and publication norms as they do on the intrinsic properties of the source metaphor itself. For students and scholars of translation studies, Newmark’s framework remains an indispensable starting point for developing the critical metalanguage needed to analyze and justify translation choices, even as more recent theoretical models have added important nuances to the picture he originally sketched.
References
Munday, J. (2016). Introducing translation studies: Theories and applications (4th ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315691862
Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.14
Schaffner, C. (2004). Metaphor and translation: Some implications of a cognitive approach. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(7), 1253–1269. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2003.10.012